My story begins in 1947 - Page 1.

October 10. 2015:  These first photos are from the summer of 1947 when I was an infant as you can see below.

My mother had her hair cut short as the summer of 1947 began.  This photo was in front our my first home at 1007 Foster Street in Dalton, Georgia.  We lived here until the fall of 1957.

My father was also proud of his son.  Until I scanned this photo, I had forgotten about how my father always had pens and pencils in his shirt pocket.  I have become my father in that respect.

The new baby for Geneva and husband Claude Thorne is the focus of the summer of 1947.  I was still in old-school cloth diapers in 1947.  This was many years before disposable diapers.

This is my mother sitting in a lawn chair with me later in 1947 as you see by the length of her hair and that I now have shoes on my feet.

Her mother, my "Granny" Cooper had her chance to hold the baby on the front porch of her home and country store on Sand Mountain in Dade County, Georgia.  It is 55 miles from our home in Dalton, Georgia.  Dade  County is where Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee all come together.

While we were living our lives in 1947, the Jewish State of Israel came into existence.   The US Air Force became a separate branch of the armed forces and pilot Chuck Yeager became the fastest man on the planet when he broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1 rocket plane.  

It is not long before the baby starts trying to stand up with some help from the older brother and sister.  I could not do much about the out-of-focus condition of this image. I discovered the photo to the right in my Aunt Ruth's photo album about me and it happens to be taken the very same day as the photo above. and the photo below and to the right.

The photo to the right and the one directly above it came from a photo album from my Aunt Ruth.  The fat around my knees shows I was well nourished at this point in my young life.  The photo was taken in the front yard at 1007 Foster Street in Dalton, Georgia.  My father painted commercial signs for part of his income.  His sign hangs below the house number and says "THORNE SIGN SHOP".   He worked on small jobs in the garage at the back of the house, and out of the car for bigger jobs at business locations in the area.  He later had a Chevrolet panel wagon.  Think of it as a car chassis "station wagon", all metal, two doors with hand-cranked windows, and one side-hinged rear door with a fixed window.  It looked like this photo I found on the internet, but not in show room condition of course, and no fender skirts. It had a throttle knob on the dash as this was before the age of the "cruise control" as it exists today.  The headlight dimmer was a big foot-operated switch "button" to the left of the clutch pedal.

My sister may know whether it was her or our older brother Billy who wrote on the photo seen below.  I get the idea that photo was taken out in front of my grandmother's country store looking north.  I expect my sister Jean to send me an email when she sees this page. 

With the spring of 1948, I was walking and standing by myself.

My brother Billy looks on as I smile for the camera with my mother taking the photo.  Notice how only the "baby" is dressed for a cold weather day and big brother Billy is in a short-sleeve shirt.	My sister Jean poses with a little girl my age who lived two doors down the street from our house in Dalton.  Her name is Sandra Grove.
Sandra gets a chance to prove she can stand and walk by herself.  I have grown up seeing these photos.  Now I know why Sandra Bullock looked so familiar to me when she became a movie star.  This must be the start of my 49-face theory -- everybody looks like somebody...	And then the mothers want a photo of both of us together.

These photos appear to be later in 1948 based on my size and the warm weather shorts I am wearing.

My father took this photo as I was not a photographer yet.

Here is a photo from the same day as you can tell by the clothes my mom has on from above.  The lady is Fran Gordy, another neighbor from our street in Dalton.

We got a new Ford in 1949, and it was photographed in more ways than one as you can see below.  This angle shows the neighbor's house just East of our house at 1007 Foster Street.

Now you can see me in 1949 with mom and the new car.

Here is the front of the house with Billy, Jean, and Sandra Keister, the next door neighbor about a year older than me, on her tricycle.  She has an older sister Nancy who will show up in these pages in the late 1950's.  We have a lot more to cover in the 1950's.

And of course, what better way to take the new car for a ride than go see Granny Cooper (Alice Whetzell).

We would go to visit my grandmother's sister near Fort Oglethorpe and Rossville, Georgia just south of Chattanooga, Tennessee.

This is Lucille Kennedy, my grandmother's sister and her youngest child Dale.  She has older children from her first marriage.   She had red hair.  Although her face may remind us of the famous Kennedy family from Massachusetts, she is the daughter of a German immigrant with the last name Whetzell.

Here is Pete Kennedy, her second husband with his son Dale.  I never heard much about her first husband, but I have seen his photo.   I got the feeling he may been in military service during the second World War and did not survive.

The family album has only begun, with many more pages to come.