My Father at War
My father, Herbert Homer Henderson, was born on a cattle ranch in central Washington state. But he didn't like chasing cattle through the brush for weeks at a time, so he ran off and joined the Navy. He was sixteen and he lied about his age. He served his tour of duty on a battleship as an ordinanceman.
World War I started at about the time his enlistment was up, so instead of re-enlisting in the Navy, he joined the Army. He was sent to France to be part of the Coastal Artillery and, according to him, saw absolutely no action whatever.
That I must take with a grain of salt. He always insisted that he was never in any danger during World War II either, except that once an air compressor exploded near him, but I learned from his military records, which I received after his death, that he was in the hospital up on the hillside above Pearl Harbor during the attack on 12/7/1942 and was on the first ship load of those sent to hospitals in Maryland.
By the way, very old photos like this one, the one of my grandmother and the one of my Aunt Ella required an exposure of several minutes during which the subject could not move. This is why you rarely see people smiling in those old photos and why they wore high collars (to hide the clamps around their necks from the metal stands holding them in place and keeping them from moving). Hands were placed in stable positions, too, to prevent movement. A typical exposure was about three minutes.
Women wore a lot more clothing a couple of centuries ago than they do now. I read somewhere that the average woman's outfit for going out away from home, with multiple petticoats and everything, weighed about thirty pounds in the time of Queen Victoria. No wonder they always seemed to be fainting.
So when you see an old photo of someone, particularly a woman, dressed from ankle to neck, grimly standing in a simple pose for the camera, it really did cost them a significant effort to do so.
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Comments (2)
I'm glad photographic technology has progressed since then!
Not only did women wear those 30 pound outfits, but don't forget the corsets that created those tiny little waists and effectively prevented them from breathing properly. No wonder they fainted!
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