AncestorPuzzles.com: Reunion with Sibs Yields Fun Pics

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Reunion with Sibs Yields Fun Pics

Reviewing family photos with your siblings is a fun thing to do when families reunite. My brother, Faran Cimino hosted us at his house on September 17 and my sister Vicky Smith brought some old family photos that she gave to me and Faran. I made copies of all of the pictures with my smart phone and downloaded them into a folder on my PC for editing. I copied both sides of the photo with my camera phone if it had anything written on the back.

My memories of many events in my childhood is pretty fuzzy. I think I have tried to bury some of my unhappy memories. Good memories have been lost in the collateral damage. Old pictures can bring some of those memories flooding back. The picture below was one of those good memories.

Kitten rescue at 2352 Craig Avenue, Sacramento, California about 1961
Left to right: Vicky Cimino, Elaine Kelly, Vince Cimino and Nick Cimino with hands on hips.

I am estimating that I was about seven years old which places the date at 1961. It appears that I was pretty proud of myself for crawling under our house and rescuing this litter of kittens. The mama cat had delivered her kittens inside the foundation of our fireplace. We could hear the mewing in the vicinity of our fireplace so my parents sent me into the crawl space on the rescue mission. It was a difficult extraction process reaching inside the opening in the bricks.

We are all standing near the opening to the crawl space and "Gram" Elaine is holding a tray of kittens with a dish of milk. Vince is wearing a Yogi Bear sweatshirt. Our father was a telephone installer and you can see the telephone connection on the wall. I crawled under the house several times to add telephone wire as we had phones in several rooms of the house. Our mother probably took the picture. Gram Elaine was always a "sharp-dressed" woman. A few years later Gram Elaine was back at the house full-time when our Mom spent several months in the hospital.

Gram Elaine drove a red Corvair Monza convertible to her secretarial job at the State Capitol. I was allowed to go out to the car and start the engine on the frosty mornings in Sacramento. I would also get a ride to school at my junior high school which was once named Charles Goethe and has since been renamed to Rosa Parks Middle School.

Here is a chronology of all of the schools that I attended in and around Sacramento:

1960-1963 Freeport Elementary Grade 1-3, 2118 Meadowview Road Sacramento, CA 95832
1963-1965 John Bidwell Elementary Grade 4-6 accelerated, 1730 - 65th Avenue Sacramento, CA 95822
1965-1966 C.M Goethe Jr. High School [renamed Rosa Parks Middle School] 2250 - 68th Avenue Sacramento, CA 95822
1966-1968 John Still Jr. High; 2250 John Still Drive Sacramento, CA 95832
1968-1971 J.F. Kennedy High School, Graduation 1971; 6715 Gloria Drive Sacramento, CA 95831
1971-1973 Cosumnes River College; 8401 Center Parkway, Sacramento, CA 95823
1973-1975 U.C. Davis, graduation June 1975, B.A. Political Science

Vicky shared a couple of other pictures that illustrate our experience at Lake Tahoe where Gram Elaine and Grandpa George lived:

Faran is facing the camera in this shot that was taken on the Valhalla beach at the south shore of Lake Tahoe. The back of the picture was marked August 1972 so Faran was nine years old. My back is to the camera. This may explain my basal cell carcinoma that I had removed from my back a few years ago.

Vince and Faran Cimino are playing in the snow at Lake Tahoe. The estimated date on this one is 1965 or 1966. We were very fortunate to be able to spend many weekends and vacations with our grandparents who lived in South Lake Tahoe.

Here are some family group shots that we took in front of Faran's house.