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Topic starter
22/02/2025 4:08 pm
I was half way through basic training when I contracted pneumonia and after two weeks in Walson Army Hospital at Fort Dix, NJ, I got 2 weeks of convalescent leave. (Note in the pics, I lost about 25 lbs) I had some pics take of me and my beloved '65 Satellite Golden Commando. It was to be the last time I drove it as when I graduated basic training, I had to ship out quick to Fort Sam Houston for a combo of combat medic and lab technician. My father sold the car and gave the money to my wife to meet me in Thailand. Anyway, I still miss that car. I loved the look of that one year only design, the engine sound when I opened the 'dumps', and the sound it made when I depressed the throttle enough to open the mechanical secondaries, I can't say I miss tuning the engine weekly with that dual point ignition and balancing the banks. Behing my car is my father's blue 352 Ford sedan 'cop car' which, with a dash mounted 'gum ball machine' I had bought, I used to scare the crap out of my buddies when I lit it up. My father was a bit jealous when I bought that Satellite, so he had just bought that 390 fastback Ford which he claimed he only bought it to house his fishing poles... yeah, right? The pics were found when my mother died and I was cleaning out her house. I hope you get a kick out of these old faded photographs.
22/02/2025 5:41 pm
It's great to have these pics and nice to share them with us. Over the years I've lost so many of mine. And let's not forget to say "Thank-you for your service Rich". 🇺🇸
Steve
22/02/2025 6:09 pm
The pics were found when my mother died and I was cleaning out her house.
God bless mothers, right? I found a few personal "goodies" too under the same circumstances. Great pics & memories Rich, thank you for your service! I love that '65 too!
Topic starter
22/02/2025 6:46 pm
@chris My mother was a bit weird in a lot of ways. For a good 50 years she was "putting together an album" for me and I found it only after she died. She saved EVERYTHING put couldn't bring herself to part with anything. Now my house is filled to the brim with 3 generations of... stuff. My wife keeps saying we have to go through the stuff but I'm thinking we'll just die and dump it on the kids. There's so much cool stuff with great stories. I'm forever finding stuff like professional portraits of my mother's parents taken in Vienna well before WWl when he was an officer in the Austro-Hungarian military. I found so much history I could write a book. Unfortunately, for every piece of history nobody ever talked about, I have a million questions with no one left alive to ask.
and this with my mother circa 1916 in NYC:
22/02/2025 8:29 pm
@rich-sufficool I find it fascinating that you know as much as you do - thanks to your mother. Seems like you'd be a good candidate for "Finding your Roots" with Henry Louis Gates Jr. Those are remarkably well-preserved photographs; you're lucky to have them.
22/02/2025 9:20 pm
Nice ! Photographs are a wonderful way to preserve and remember the past .....people, places and things.
22/02/2025 11:11 pm
I love this stuff! Very cool, and what an interesting history!
Tony Perrone and Christopher Moroni reacted
23/02/2025 6:51 am
Love the old car pics and seeing you in uniform - you shared some of those with me previously, not sure if they were with that specific car or not. The archival family photos hit a chord. My mom did much the same thing and I inherited the albums like you did. Super cool 'stuff' as you call it!!
23/02/2025 9:05 am
Thanks for sharing this insight into your family with us all.
23/02/2025 10:52 am
Rich, thanks to my mother, I am currently in possession of 34 large albums of family photographs going back to the 1860s, they take up one wall of my fourth bedroom, now called the cat’s room. Periodically, I look through the albums. My sister-in-law has published a variety of books on the family based on digitized images from them. My mother died in 1999. Those albums are a lasting legacy which I hope my children will cherish later.
Thank you for sharing your family past and your memories, Rich. Love your car and your Austrian relatives. You reminded me to have another dive into family history. Another look at cars from my past.
Topic starter
23/02/2025 12:55 pm
The myriad of questions on both my mother and father's side started with Ancestry.com and really took off when I started corresponding with a distant cousin (once removed) who is a rabid amateur genealogist. I had dismissed the first DNA results as impossible: I was 1/4 Ashkenazi Jew according to the results. I had thought my mother's parents were Catholic. It turns out that my grandfather was classed as "Assimilated Jew" in Austro-Hungary. Little was ever spoken about my grandfather's brother excepted they along with my mother visited him after WW1 and it was said he had been in banking in Bohemia which became western Czechoslovakia after the war. He evidently went back to Vienna where in 1943, he was shipped to a concentration camp in Belarus and killed. (my cousin actually found the number of the train and box car he was shipped in!). None of this was ever talked about and the big question was 'did my grandfather try to get him out via sponsorship? If yes, did he refuse to leave?
On my father's side, the history is fascinating and all I had was a family narrative and my cousin's work. Just the war time exploits of the brothers in WWll could fill a book and again, the more info, the more questions unlikely to be ever answered.