Sailing to Cuba

For fun!
My grandmother and several of her 3 sisters (maybe all of them) used to sail from the US to Cuba to gamble and have fun. That was before Fidel started making things uncomfortable for US folks.  So it was probably in the 30s-40s. But first, how about some posed photos with cars...

I have some lovely shots of Mozelle (Grandmommy to me) with some cars.  They remind me of the Sepia Saturday prompt this week.

Whoever first took a digital photo of the original didn't get many pixels into it...but this was supposedly in the 50s.  Grandmommy was still dressing well, and had a nice car...or had a friend with a nice car.

Here she was in 1925, posted in my mother's photo album.  So that's another car in the background.

I think she has on some snazzy boots.

Great Aunt Margaret was the youngest of the 4 Miller sisters...here she was in '27, with another car in the background!

And here I am (around 3 or 4) in Dallas TX with Grandmommy, who had made my little coat, hat and leggings set.  She was a whiz dressmaker in San Antonio TX.

Another recent find on Ancestry was this passport with a photo of Great Aunt Dorothy and her husband Buck Buchanan.  They married late in life (when she was 47), and he had grown children who I never met.

Stop over and see what more Sepians have come up with from this prompt photo...

I heard about the Cuban gambling trips as a child, and somehow remembered it! And then recently I found a shipping manifest about 2 of them returning to the US from Havana...it was real!

Oh I'm so glad I published this document here, because I see their father, Charles H. Miller (68) went as well as Dorothy (32) and Margaret Miller (26).  The S. S. Florida docked in Miami, FL in 1936 from Havana.

So my grandmother, Mozelle, and her other sister, Rowena, weren't on that trip.

 All these wonderful relations are no longer posing by cars with their smiles, but I remember learning how to play cards from them (but not poker!)

Early St. Louis summertime

There I am, all of 8 years old, standing with my 4 year old sis in front of my dad's pride and joy, a Studebaker in 1950, St. Louis MO. The photo also ties in to my mother's mother, Grandmommy (Mozelle Munhall) who made our matching dresses, and also to remember some great aunts (actually cousins) Alice and Gertie Attaway, who embroidered the pretty Peter Pan collars.

Of course little girls don't pay much attention to how much work it took my dad to keep his cars running, as well as a daily grind of 8 hours behind some desk or another.  And then to have time to enjoy life on a picnic.  I do know that he was very good to all us girls, and we held him in our hearts all his life.

I think since my birthday is in August, it was probably mine being celebrated with a homemade cake, and I would have been a big 11 that year. (My other immediate family birthdays were in February, March, and November.)

I am sharing the blanket (wearing polka-dots on the left) with cousin Claudette behind me, then sis Mary Beth beside me, cousin Sandra next and then my father.  I'm thinking that we're someplace in Forest Park, St. Louis to have a lake next to us.  The food stuffs in the foreground include one of my  favorites still, Cheeze-Its!  This was the days before plastic grocery bags, so there are several paper bags with some yummys in them, probably chips and sandwiches. They would have been wrapped in wax paper, as plastic sandwich bags were still to be invented.

Claudette and Sandra were 11 months apart in age, and had come to St. Louis on the train probably from their home in Houston. Sandra was just 2 years older than myself with a December birthday. Now that I think about it, I wonder if they traveled alone all that way. I kind of doubt it. When my mom and myself and sis went to San Antonio by train several years later, it was a 16 hour trip.

Claudette will turn 80 this Sept. 28, 2019. I've been out of touch, so I hope she's well.

Sharing with Sepia Saturday, which has a photo of a lot of cars...thus my link to it this week.