Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Wordly Wednesday: Family Photographs - Post 67: Gassing Up?

I'm posting old family photographs from my collection on Wednesdays, but they won't be wordless Wednesday posts like others do - I simply am incapable of having a wordless post.

This photograph is from loose pictures found in a box, probably from my grandfather's photo album, that I scanned during Scanfest in February:




Isn't this a great photograph? This is my mother, Betty Virginia Carringer, at about age 4 (so perhaps in 1923) on her toy car, at the neighborhood gas station. The service station man is pretending to put gas into her "New-mobile."

There was a gasoline station on the northwest corner of the block where the Carringer family lived. The station was on the southeast corner of the intersection of 30th Street and Ivy Street in San Diego. The station, and a small auto repair shop, were there when I was a boy in the 1950s, and it is still there today.

My grandfather, Lyle Carringer, probably took this photograph. Did he stage this, or is it spontaneous? My guess is that Lyle had his car serviced at this station regularly and knew the owner and the workers. Therefore, the workers probably knew Betty and were kidding around with Lyle to set up this picture.

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