THE WAY THEY WERE

I love old photographs, even of people I don't know. Maybe you do too.  This is one of my favorite photographs. It's from the early 1930s of my father and three oldest siblings on the porch of his father-and-mother-in-law's house in Belmar NJ.

I like the way my father's hair, despite the widow's peak, is still middle parted a la F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1920s' do, and the ways all three of my brothers, Tommy, Jimmy and Robert, despite being children reflect the personalities I knew them as when I came along a decade later, after a few others, and as they remained for the rest of their lives.

Tommy became Father Campion, Jimmy was known in the family as "Buddy," and Robert was his middle name, first name William, with no one ever able to give any reason why he was known by his middle name, but his tough guy personality is there in the two or three-year-old between his father's legs. They've all been gone for a long time now, but they live on in my memories and heart.