Drive My Car

Last week I received a box of old glass photo negatives from my only surviving aunt.

I suspect that they were taken sometime in the early 1900s. I do know that they were shot by her late husband’s uncle Oscar, my great uncle. I met him once, he was living with my grandparents for a time. He was quite old then, and not in very good health. He barely spoke to anyone. Oscar had been a construction worker—a dynamiter who worked on Mount Rushmore—and, for a brief time, a photographer. The negatives were a mixed lot, farm machinery, houses, flowers, and a few family groupings. There was one image that particularly caught my eye (click on it to enlarge it):

It is one of the very few pictures of my grandfather as a young man, the women behind him are his sisters and the woman behind the wheel is my grandmother, if it was 1917, the year they were married, she would have been about 19 and my grandfather would have been 8 years older.