Sharing memories of long ago
Save those family pictures
I was looking at some old blogs and reblogs and found this one that I posted five years ago.
Blame this blog on Clarksville real estate professional Debbie Reynolds. Debbie got many of us thinking about past moments that we could share in blogs.
Recently, one of my younger sisters, Lynne Kelley, emailed some old family photographs to Dolores. Lynne and her family live near Chicago. She is the designated family historian. The group of photographs included a couple of pictures of me that were taken when I was very young. The photograph in this blog had a note on the back “four and a half years old”.
You are too young to relate to this time frame but that age would indicate that the photograph was taken early in 1942. It was wartime and we lived in a community that has a strong military orientation. The white house in the background was our newly built home at 10 Park Place in the Cradock neighborhood of Portsmouth, Virginia. I do not remember the name of my dog, also in the background.
At that time, Cradock was in Norfolk County and the County covered the area south all of the way to the North Carolina line. Cradock was one of the early planned communities in the country and was developed during World War I to house workers at the nearby Norfolk Naval Shipyard. The Marine barracks were within the shipyard. Portsmouth is also the location of the Naval Hospital and the Coast Guard base.
During the war, eligible men that had a child were given the option of joining the Coast Guard or a local police force rather than being drafted for military service. My father, John J. Kelley opted to join the Norfolk County Police force where he served for ten years.
I was too young to understand the horrors of war but was old enough to know that our heroes were in uniform. Several family members would visit us when on leave from their military duties and they knew that they could find a sofa bed and some good meals when they came to our home.
Save those family pictures that will help some of us recall memories of long ago.
Roy Kelley
Comments(46)