The Photo Purge

When Dad died in 1971, Mom went a bit off the deep end.  After an aborted attempt to put us all out of our misery, then taking us out of school for the month of October for a visit to Ephrata, Washington, our lives continued on a weird path.

In 1972, there was a huge rift that occurred in the family. I was only 11 years old, and the little kids were six, so we had no awareness of the adult complexities behind it.  But the drama, for me, began when Mom suddenly started digging in the closet and under her bed, searching for every photo and negative of her kids.  She was ranting and raving while she retrieved every box and photo album and carried them to the living room. After spending a few hours locating every photo she could find, she went to her desk and got the scissors.

I sat there with her while she opened each box, searched through the photos and negatives, and isolated every single one that had an image of Tim.  As she cursed, yelled, and cried, she took the scissors and cut his face out of each print.  It took her hours, but she finally had hundreds of photos cut up, with baby Tim, toddler Tim, schoolboy Tim, teen Tim, and adult Tim in a little pile on the floor.  Then she went to the fireplace, crumpled some newspapers and tossed them in, and lit a match.  As she threw his photos in the fire, she continued to curse him, screaming that she wanted to forget he ever was born, that she regretted having him, that she never wanted to talk to him again.

Mom even changed the captions on the negative holders, writing a 4 over the 5, and crossing out Tim's name.

I knew she had been mad at him when Dad died because right after the funeral, he went to Dad's garage and trashed it, but that happened months before.  When I asked her what happened to make her so mad at him this time, she told me that Tim was trying to take us three kids away from her.
She then asked me if I remembered Mopsy.  Mopsy was my beloved pure white Angora kitten that I had when I was 4 years old.  Mopsy just disappeared one day and I never knew what happened to her.  When I told Mom I remembered her, and she had run away from home, Mom corrected me.  "No," she said.  "I gave her to Tim, and he beat her and threw her against the wall and killed her."
I have no idea if this was true or a lie.  But it was a good way to get a little girl to immediately hate and fear Tim.

Me and Mopsy. She disappeared soon after this was taken

As we watched the photos go up in smoke, I sat in shock, remembering my little friend Mopsy, and wondering why Tim would do such a horrible thing to her.  Mom packed up the cropped photos and negatives and started putting everything back in the closet, and I wondered, if Tim takes us away from Mom, is he going to beat us and throw us against the walls too?

It is usually never possible to completely purge someone from one's life, and in this case, Mom missed just a handful of family photos. A few were not stored with the others, and remain intact to this day.  This is one of two that I have that escaped the photo purge of 1972:

The first five kids, with Tim in the center

I don't know what happened between Mom and Tim after that.  I just know that when you fast-forward to June of 1974, things between them are back to normal. She still hated his wife Delores. We rarely visited with his family.  But he was obviously back in good graces, as evidenced by this next photo, taken in 1974 on my graduation day from St Vincent's school. And here we are, getting our picture taken by Mom, standing in front of the fireplace where nearly all of his childhood photos were purged 2 short years before.

On the way to my graduation, Tim back on Eagle Street, like nothing ever happened.

Just recently, I have been researching family records which can be found on Ancestry.com. I found the record of Tim's marriage to Dolores.  It occurred in April, 1972.  And there was the answer to my question of why his photos were destroyed.  I believe the news of Tim's marriage to the despised woman is what triggered that manic purge of the photos, which to an 11 year old, was a very bewildering and scary day on Eagle Street.