Dot and Joe, Helen and Flo

No dates on these but the first two were most likely take in 1918.

Joe, Dotty, and Helen

Dot (not Ruth; even Grandma got them mixed up.)

This one is a favorite. It's of Helen and Flo @ 1920.

I love their happy, goofy grins and their excellent bathing costumes. 

We saw them all grown up in the blog entries posted on May 15-17.

Sibs and Pups

These photos are from the early 1920s, featuring Alice's four youngest siblings and a couple of cute puppies.

Ruth, Dot, and Helen

 Dot, Ruth, and furry friend

Dot, Joe, and Ruth

It's Memorial Day

It's one of the days on which we honor those who served our country, 

including two generations of the Smith and Bierbaum families. 

Alice's note on the back of this photo of Elwood G. and his nephew is 

"Raymond and his Uncle El." 

Taken in or around 1917

 A generation later, there was new war. 

Here is "Brother Joe."  

No date

Here is my old man as a very young one, in his uniform. Photo is circa 1942. 

After he died, we found the buttons from that coat in his dresser drawer. 

Elwood J. hated the army, but he saved the buttons.

Graduation Day, 1915

Here we are at the end of the first of Alice's albums. 

Posted on the last page is one of its oldest photos.

Alice Bierbaum in 1915 on the occasion of her graduation from the eighth grade

If this photo was taken in the spring of that year, then Alice was a girl of twelve. 

This is the earliest photo of Alice in this collection. 

 This photo is not from the same album page as the others shown here, 

but it is from the same year, if not the same day. 

 Here is Alice's younger brother Joe with their baby sister Dotty in 1919.

We've seen a slightly different version of this photo earlier in the album—

Great Grandpa Bierbaum at the beach surrounded by the girls--

daughters Anne and Alice, and their friend Ann Fisher. 

I will start posting photos from another, smaller album of Alice's. 

The photos are from the same period as this album--the late 1910s to the mid 1920s, 

and they show many of the same faces and places. You'll see! 

Feeding the Geese

 Ruthie and her mother, Marie, feeding the geese; date unknown

 Helen, Dot, and Joe in Sunday best; date unknown

 Helen, Joe, Dot, and Ruth; photo undated

Alice and girl friends at the lake; photo undated

Ruth, Dot, and Joe 1922

 In the dog house! 

Ruth, solo, just about taller than the flowers. 

Lakeside Fun

Here is a group of photos, undated, but I'd guess 1926. My father Elwood James Smith was born on October 4, 1925. In these photos, he's a toddler, spending time with his Aunt Ruth, who was only 5 years older. 

I'm not sure who all these folks are, but the young man on the left is most certainly Joe Bierbaum, Alice's younger brother. He caught a fish on the same day. Is that Ruth again on the "tricycle," front right?

I assume that Bobbie is either a cousin or a neighbor.

Is this the lake in Piscataway, NJ, I always heard about from my father? The land around it had long been developed by the time I came along, but I heard about summers spent at "the lake." I went to Rutgers University in the late 1980s and lived and drove near where the lake and the house had once been—or so I thought; Daddy's directions were never very clear—and also near the cemetery where Grandma and Grandpa Smith are buried. Piscataway and New Brunswick were almost completely citified by then, yet I had a sense of what an open, rural place it had been 50 or 60 years before. 

-L

Alice and Siblings, 1918

Finally some siblings. Alice had two brothers and four sisters: Anne (b. 1899), Robert (b. 1900), 

Helen (b. 1910), Joseph (b. 1912), Dorothy (b. 1917), and Ruth (b. 1919). Alice took a lot of pictures of her two youngest sisters, as you'll see. They were so close in age, that even she had trouble telling them apart in the photos. On the one at bottom, you can see that she crossed out Ruth and wrote in Dot. 

Friend Ann Fischer is here again. Kathy can tell me if that's Annie Mac on the right. What is Alice doing with her hands? It's as if she's pretending to be holding the dog's reins. No idea about the dog's name. I never heard stories about a dog. He (or she) is quite handsome, though.

 We scanned this one just in time. Little Ruthie is fading away.

Dot, not Ruth. 

-L