My two daughters have visited me the last two weekends and they did some closet exploring.
Tami wanted to get all of her stuff out of her closet - her wedding dress, her college clothes and memorabilia, etc. However, to get into the closet, we needed to clear a path in the genealogy cave to get to it. I went through three stacks of paper (each about three feet high, mainly printouts of syllabus articles and periodical articles) just to get to the closet. Tami took some of her stuff home, but left me with a lot of clothes, her softball trophies, and other stuff to trash or giveaway. I kept some of my family history papers but trashed most of them, and there are still three foot high piles remaining that I need to work on.
Also in the closet was stuff that came home with me after my mother died in 2002, including some family history material that I had forgotten about, and three things in particular that I want to keep - my mother's artwork scrapbook from her childhood, my father's scrapbook of newspaper articles and photographs from his bowling career in San Diego, my grandfather's apartment rental records and receipts for the five rental properties he owned from 1950 to 1976, and an artifact from one of my relatives dating back to 1867.
My father, Frederick Walton Seaver (1911-1983) was a ten-pin bowler in San Diego from 1948 to about 1968. He bowled on teams in the top leagues in San Diego, and carried an average of about 195 for many years. In the 1950s and 1960s, he bowled in most of the bowling alleys around San Diego. His teams bowled in the San Diego San Diego city tournaments and the California State Bowling Tournament (which was held in a different city each year in California. Going to the State tournament was our summer vacation in the 1950s. He was written up in the San Diego Union and San Diego Tribune newspapers on the Sports pages, and in the bowling newspaper, The San Diego Bowler, almost every month.
My father kept a scrapbook, which is chock full of newspaper articles, the bowling newspaper, photographs, and even some bowling score cards. I photographed several of his black and white pictures from the collection. In 1964-5, one of his teams was in the San Diego City Tournament:
Fred is on the left of this photograph.
Here is a photograph from the 1960's of him bowling:
My father was 6 feet 2 inches and weighed about 190 pounds in the 1960s. I often watched in awe as he bowled 200 score games. I think his high score ever was 279, and he had several series (three games) in the 680s. His approach was very smooth and graceful.
One of the highlights of our life in the 1950s was Saturday morning. After bowling in his league, he always stopped at a bakery on the way home and bought a box of donuts for the five of us to enjoy for breakfast!
My brother Stanley and I bowled in a Kid's league in the late 1950s, and I continued bowling into the 1970s, and then we had two darling children. I met Linda at a bowling alley!
This is definitely part of our family's family history!!!
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