Tradition

        I have been wanting to dive into the digital world of audio/visual creating and sharing for quite a while now, but for this almost 80 year old grandma it seemed daunting to say the least. I thought this could be a good week to jump into those waters in a very simple way.  And I have taken that leap finally, but alas only to realize that Youtube requires a short time frame before videos will be public (at least for my account level).  So I am writing this blog with the video link inserted, but it won’t be available until midnight tonight. (lesson learned).

The theme for this week is “tradition,” and I am writing about Thanksgiving from long ago, specifically 1956. When I was but a child, we spent Thanksgiving with my mom’s parents, Nannie and PopPop (Florence Koetzle Harley and C. Wilbur Harley). They lived in the Atlantic City area. Along with our family, Mom. Dad, Jim, Bob and me, all of Nannie’s brothers, sisters and spouses attended as well. Most of them lived in the Philadelphia area, except for Aunt Edythe and her husband David Dillon.

This particular Thanksgiving it was decided that they would also all celebrate birthdays for us three kids, since our birthdays were on Christmas or in Jim’s case 5 days after Christmas. In addition, our dad brought his reel-to-reel audio player/recorder with him, and he was able to capture some of the afternoon’s highlights on tape. Remember, this was 1956 !!! Heck, TV was still brand new then. No personal computers, no cel phones, etc.

Almost all of our dad’s reel-to-reel tapes from this era (1950s and 60’s) survived, and a few years ago Jim and I were listening to some of them at Jim’s house. How crazy is it that he also had a reel-to-reel player (now a veritable collector’s item, even more so than VCRs). Jim was able to quasi-digitize them (by playing them and recording them on his PC). Later on he sent a few of us these MP3 recordings on thumb drives. 

Vintage Reel-to-reel player

Most of the recordings are quite long, and so to make them more enjoyable for today’s world, they need to be split into shorter segments. So this is my first attempt at doing that. Of course, I am using Blogger as my blog platform, and it is free, so YouTube was the easiest way for me to create an audio file that could be shared. I just used a simple photograph as the “video” part.  

Dad (Roscoe) maybe around 1956?

With all that now said, the reason I chose this Thanksgiving as my “tradition” is because of something PopPop (Mom’s father) said when he was introduced on the recording. He said that this “Thanksgiving was about the 45th Thanksgiving that they had all celebrated together”. I must have heard him say this before when I listened, but it never really sunk in until this week. That means that around 1911 (he might have been year or two off) was when they started celebrating this holiday together. Nannie and PopPop were married in September 1913, so who knows they celebrated this holiday before they got married. But regardless, that is an amazing tradition for these relatives to be together so many years. Of course, I’m sure that our great grandparents were there early on too. We kids were never blessed with meeting any of our great-grandparents. 

Nannie and PopPop 50th wedding anniv. Sept 1963

So the YouTube photo I used for the video is Nannie and PopPop from their 50th wedding anniversary celebration in 1963, so only seven years after this Thanksgiving that was recorded. Our dad says a few words, there is some laughter, then he introduces C. Wilbur Harley, more laughter, followed by the host of the evening (Dad neglected to say her name - Florence Harley). I suppose that only Jim, Bob. And I actually knew them and knew their voices, so I wanted to share just a little of them in this week’s blog “Tradition”.