Seventy years ago my upstate New York grandparents received a Thanksgiving
blessing of not one, but two blue-eyed, blonde sons. Mert and Bert Hibbard
grew up during the poverty years of the Depression with a camera happy
aunt.
Fascinated with her twin nephews she photographically recorded their
childhood. Rosey-cheeked babies perched in white, wooden high chairs.
Toddlers in jump suits and rubber boots inspect the barn yard. Big brothers
soberly watch over their baby sister in her pram. Years later the trio pose
on Grandpa Holt’s wooden porch drinking their soda pop or proudly show off
their new clothes and their new wives.
My mother took plenty of pictures of Dad – with their five children born in
six years, pastoring a small country church and falling asleep reading
Zane Grey novels. Most of those pictures, stored in a suitcase, were
destroyed when their house burnt down.
The fire started from clothes left
too close to a stove pipe in the bedroom where my little brother was
sleeping. Mom grabbed him and my little sister, but not the suitcase filled
with nine years of pictures. It was the least of her concerns that day.
The fire gave Dad the incentive to go West. He loaded us all into the
family station wagon and went job prospecting in Zane Grey country.
We have
wonderful black and white pictures, and a few color photos, of our two week
trip across the U.S. of A. and back to the foothills of New York. Two years
later he tried again. That was the year we ate Thanksgiving dinner in a
restaurant somewhere out west while his brother celebrated their birthday
on the family farm.
Having been west, Dad bought a farm over the hill from his brother and
stayed for five years until the west called again. He found a job in Casa
Grande, Ariz., rented a house and we finished the school year. Then
homesickness propelled us east again to farming.
Two years later, ill with “farmer’s lung,” he sold his second farm, went
west and stayed until for his three oldest children graduated from high
schools in Arizona and Utah. His two youngest, however, finished school
back east where he began his career as a truck driver.
The next time the pioneering spirit hit, he cut down trees and built a
two-story log cabin on the family farm. He finished the cabin with
electricity, hard wood floors, double paned windows and, eventually,
running water.
Between spurts of working on the log cabin in the East, he drove trucks for
fifteen years. Sometimes he was based in New York, sometimes in New Mexico.
A freak accident in his mid-50s ended his cross country trucking and made
him eligible for disability. Too few years afterwards, cancer took his
faithful traveling companion and photographyer, my mother.
Months after her death, he was traveling alone in Zane Grey country when a
mild stroke slowed him down.
He is now settled, near his sister, in southern California. Tomorrow he
will celebrate his 70th birthday without a picture shoot of him and his
bed-ridden twin – who still lives on the New York farm where they were
born.
I wish them both a happy birthday.