Dad, Mom, and Family in The Tidings

From left to right, we have Sally, Dad, Danton, Tom, Mom, baby Joe, Mary, Mike, Charlen, and Chuck.

That is Judge Roger Pfaff, one of Dad's favorites, congratulating Dad on the birth of his 8th child, Joseph Patrick Walgenbach on November 6, 1959.

This is the Tidings Edition in which our family is featured.  Its date is November 20, 1959.  I've transcribed the article below.

Here is the article.  The headline reads "Chuck's Day Spans Joy, Tragedy."

     After a two-week stint of doing diapers, cooking meals and washing dishes, Chuck Walgenbach will appear first thing Monday morning in Judge Roger Pfaff's divorce court.  

     Sounds bad, but it isn't.  You see, Chuck is Judge Pfaff's court clerk.  Monday he repots back from a two-week vacation.

     Diapers and dishes a vacation?  WEll, if you could hear the sad tales of wrecked marriages that Chuck hears 35 times a day, a few diapers aren't so bad.  

     The diapers, by the way, increase and multiplied two weeks ago today when Chuck's wife, Sally, had their eighth child, Joseph Patrick, who scaled in at a hefty 10 pounds, 14 ounces.  Mother and son are both resting well at home in San Gabriel Mission Parish.  

How's Chow?

Meanwhile the lean ex-Marine has taken over KP and chores necessary to keeping the Walgenbach household operational.  Lending assistance after all is Charlen 16, Danton 12, Charles Jr., 10, Sally 8, Mary 6, Michael 2, and Thomas 1.

My Favorite Photos of Mom

I love this photo.  I like the gilded frame too.  I need to take a better one sans the glare.  Family members will recognize the location of this photo.  It is Mom's backyard.  She is standing in front of her favorite colored roses.

I love this picture of Mom.  The first time that I saw it was in Denver.  Grammie lived in an underground apartment on Detroit Street at the corner of East 16th Street.  Across the street was, and still is, East High School.  Dad, Joe, Tom, and I went down the side or back stairs, depending on your angle of the building, to Grammie's basement apartment.  Her front door stood directly across, maybe 15 feet, from the water-tube boiler that heated the building.  Grammie opened the door and within seconds she and Dad were engaged in an argument.  They went into the kitchen to talk.  Quickly my eyes scanned the room.  A black Bakelite 500 dial phone rested on an end-table next to small sofa.

           A Bakelite 500 phone.

A few pictures hung on the wall for beauty.  A dingy oval rug domesticated the room.  A window in the west wall was at sidewalk level.  Pictures on a table in the corner caught my eye--they were family photos.  As I approached them I was hypnotized by the beauty and familiarity of one.  It was my mother, a very young picture of my mother smiling, hopeful, and expressing delight.  She was beautiful; she was young; she was smiling.  This was the woman I had dreamed of, of a happy, beautiful, young mother.  And there she was contrasted with all of my sorrowful memories that I conjured and carried around in my head.  Maybe she wasn't unhappy, older, or defeated at all.  Maybe those characteristics were projected self-perceptions of being defeated by my losing efforts at winning exclusivity with and ownership of my mother, and from those the right and the responsibility to defend and protect her. I remember being lured to the corner by the photo.  I picked it up and studied every upward wrinkle of joy and optimism in a face I'd prayed for restoration.  I was falling in love with the picture for the first time and with my mother all over again.  From that moment on I saw my mother as a buoyant, youthful woman.  It in turn restored me.  By the way, that horsehead bookend was a birthday present from my sister, Mary, years ago.  I didn't like them immediately; in fact, I thought of throwing them out.  But I held on.  And now I am so happy that I kept them.  I love them.

Mama showing off her See's candy.  The restaurant looks like Alcapulco's, and the date is obviously very near July 15.  The year may be 1999.