Tis the season for memories of Christmases past, and so just deal with it. With that cheerful holiday introduction, I am today featuring a photograph of my family that I took at our home in Country Club Hills, a southern suburb of Chicago, during the Christmas season of 1970. I found it in a shoe box full of slides and saved it so I could post it around the holidays. And in case you doubt I was the photographer, if you look closely, you can see my reflection, along with my trusty camera and tripod, in the mirror. I e-mailed this photo to my sister Susan, and she remarked on what an incredibly glum bunch we seemed to be in that photo. Even back then nobody was crazy about me taking their photograph. In any case, in the photograph above are - from left to right - my Grandfather and Grandmother Spillard (my mother's parents), my mother Mary, my father Nelson, my sister Susan, and brother-in-law George. My Grandmother Spillard would pass away just before the following Christmas, and all three of my remaining grandparents would pass away within the next 4 years, and so the early 1970s would be a watershed period for us all. Six years after this Christmas, my parents would retire to Stuart, Florida, I would move to a studio apartment in Forest Park, Illinois - right across from the "L" train barn and the Daisy Hill meatpacking plant (a location I really loved, by the way) - and Susan and George would move to a country town called Elburn, west of Geneva, Illinois, which I understand is now just another suburb. Time moves on, whether we want it to or not.
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