As some of you may recall one of my favorite websites linked in the sidebar, is called
Shorpy. The site owner posts very large pixel, highly detailed photos of everyday life or scenes from way back in the day. It's a great place for a glimpse of a world gone by.
So the pic I have posted above is one of the
more recent additions. As soon as I saw it I felt an immediate sense of who these two people were. Solid mid-Western folks that we might once have called the salt of the earth. Of course we often just don't know a lot about the people who appear in the photos posted and such seemed to be the case here. The photo is one of a set obtained off ebay and as the caption from Shorpy tells us, it's of "Howard & Rena, April 1952." Visiting Claude's farm somewhere in Minnesota." And that should be the end of it....
But it isn't.
Incredibly (do read the comments) one of the regulars managed to track down census records and got a probable ID on the couple and who they were visiting. Then he makes some phone calls and actually tracks down relatives of this couple, who I suspect must be surprised to discover Howard and Rena now prominently featured on the internet. But the surprises keep coming...
First, and not surprisingly, Howard passed away quite a while ago (memory eternal). But Rena IS STILL ALIVE at 101! Any way...
Read it all
here.
P.S. I agree with some of the comments over at Shorpy... I want that hat and tie.