I like to post photos of my father on August 28, which was his birthday. So I was looking through my photos and although I have seen this one often, I don't think I have posted it here. This is from my mother's war-time album that begins with their first dates, then their wedding and honeymoon photos, and then Army pictures my dad sent back from Europe juxtaposed with photos of Pueblo. My mother met my father at a USO dance. He was a Brooklyn boy, in the army and stationed in Pueblo for a short time. They married six weeks after they met, had time for a honeymoon trip to Brooklyn, and then he was shipped overseas to do his bit against the Nazis.
This photo is one of the earliest photos in the album, and I believe this was their first date.* Today I cleaned it up a bit in Painter and iPhoto, but left it pretty much as it was.
This image might seem a strange choice to mark my father's birthday, but this moment marks a turning point in his life. He was a young man from Brooklyn, just passing through Colorado at the whim of the US Army, but because he had met my mother there, his life would change, and he would come back from the war to live in Pueblo, not Brooklyn. Here he is, a young bachelor, enjoying an outing at Pueblo's little zoo, enjoying the company of the woman he would marry. Years later, as a husband and father, he would make many, many trips to this zoo with his daughter, to show her the animals, let her climb "Monkey Mountain" and ride the carousel. across the street.
*(I know, there are other soldiers in the photo, so I could be wrong. But this is part of a little set of photos and I think my mother took this picture.)
