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Tuesday, November 30, 2021

Remembering Mom: It's Been Two Years


Geraldine Margaret Guokas Pape, October 19, 1928 - November 30, 2019


It's been two years now since I lost my mom, and I miss her.  I really like this photo of her from May 2, 2009, in Burnet, Texas.  Breathless and I drove down to meet Mom and Dad for lunch there, something we tried to do (in either Burnet or Lampasas, sometimes Marble Falls) every six to eight weeks.  We then went to the nearby Hamilton Creek Park to visit a while longer, before they drove back to Fredericksburg and we returned home.


© Amanda Pape - 2021 - e-mail me!

Thursday, November 25, 2021

Check Registers and Home Budgets



Some of the boxes I brought home from my parents' duplex in Austin (after my parents' move to an assisted living facility in October 2017 and my father's death just a few weeks later) contained a number of notebooks, as well as 106 check registers.  

The registers were dated from February, 1958, which was when my parents moved back to Houston, Texas (where Mom was born and they met) from Chicago, Illinois (where Dad was born), through November 2014.  Any registers after that time would have been in Dad's financial files, which my lawyer/accountant younger sister (the executor of their estates) needed to keep.

I'd knew I'd want to take a look at these old notebooks and registers at some point, and I finally got around to doing so a few months ago, when I needed to sort through much of the things I'd brought back to decide what to keep and what could go.  I decided these could go - but not until I went through all of them and made notes. I ended up with 29 pages of them!  I also pulled a few registers and notebook pages as samples to keep.

The first check in the first register (most recorded in Mom's handwriting) was dated February 24, 1958, and was made out to John B. Murphy, MD, for a doctor visit and shots (smallpox and polio) for me on January 27.  The check was for $10.  Later that year, Murphy became chairman of the pediatrics department at St. Francis Hospital in Evanston, Illinois, where I was born.  



Mom had saved the doctor's orders from my various well-baby visits in a separate place, and here is the one that corresponds to check #1.  The doctor made notes of all the vaccinations I had received at that point, since we were moving to Houston:




The notebooks began in January 1963 and went monthly through August 2016, and are all in Mom's handwriting.  In the last three years, they became messy, incomplete, and sporadic as time went on and Mom's frontotemporal degeneration manifested and worsened.  

Most of the time, Mom just used spiral notebooks for these records, mostly from her alma mater, Incarnate Word Academy in Houston (where her sister, my aunt Sister Jean Marie (Jo Ann) Guokas, was principal from 1964-1978).  A few years, she used a Simplex Home Budget Guide, but I don't think she liked its formatting (I didn't!).

In the early years, the records were very much a budget, as illustrated by the January 1963 page below.  Money was tight - my parents had four children at that point.  


A couple interesting observations about this page.  Note that my parents paid a poll tax that month.  They did so in January 1964 and January 1965 as well, but the poll tax was declared unconstitutional on February 9, 1966.

K.C. was Knights of Columbus - probably an annual membership for my dad.  My parents budgeted money to donate to the United Fund and to the Catholic Church.  Humble is Exxon today and that would be their automobile gasoline.  Mading's was a pharmacy, and Dr. Hubert L. Reid was our pediatrician.  Foley's, Nieman Marcus, Battlestein's, and Suniland Furniture were all stores where my parents had credit cards, and I'm guessing these were their monthly payments on their accounts (since the actual always matches the estimate).  

Also note that there's a charge for kindergarten, even though I attended a public school (Ridgecrest Elementary in the Spring Branch Independent School District).  School districts were not required to offer at least half-day kindergarten for free until May 30, 1995.  Interestingly, the next year my year-younger sister and I went to school at our St. Jerome Catholic Church parish school, she in kindergarten and me in first grade, and I found no record of my parents paying tuition for either of us.  It's possible that tuition was included in their church contributions, or that one of my grandparents paid it.

I could write lots more about things I found in these registers and notebooks, but I'll close with this torn piece of paper I found tucked in one of the notebooks.  Mom apparently tallied the tuition she and Dad paid 1964-1979 to St. Francis de Sales Catholic School for first (second in my case) through eighth grades for me and my four siblings.  As you can see, monthly tuition (especially when four of us were enrolled at the same time) was not all that high.  The grand total for our educations at just this one school for 15 years was just under $6,400.00.




In a future post, I'll write about Catholic high school tuition and state university tuition and required fees.   I'm thankful today that my parents invested so much in my education - I received an outstanding one through Houston-area Catholic schools.


© Amanda Pape - 2021 - e-mail me!

Tuesday, November 16, 2021

Remembering Nani


My maternal grandmother, Sara Melzina Wolfe Guokas Archibald (1907-1997), died 24 years ago on this date.  It's one of the many negative events that makes November a month that I would rather be "NO-remember."

The still image above is from a 16mm film taken by my step-grandfather Wallace Franklin "Archie" Archibald (1896-1970) on August 29, 1960.  My younger sister Karen is on the left, and I am on the right.  Nani, my grandmother, is holding my newborn brother Mark.  The film was made in Houston, Texas - I think, because of the rocking chair (which looks like my dad's), that it was at our home at the time. 7913 Cedel.

I recently had fifteen 16mm films (each ranging from 15-20 minutes long) from July 1958 to August 1965 digitized, as well as ten Hi8 videotapes from May 31, 1993 through March 1, 2003 (each about two hours long).  They were digitized, for FREE (well, except for the cost of postage to send them, and a 1TB portable drive for the digitized files), in the Texas Archive of the Moving Image Film Roundup, where I submitted them on Halloween in 2020


© Amanda Pape - 2021 - e-mail me!

Monday, November 8, 2021

Honor Roll - Presidio County, Texas

In honor of the upcoming Veterans Day and for The Honor Roll Project, I decided to transcribe the Presidio County Honor Roll in Marfa, Texas.  Here's how it looked when we visited Marfa in June, 2021.  Presidio County then had (and still has) the best COVID vaccination rate in the state.  




One side of the monument has a beautiful eagle emblem, and the following engraved:
In reverent and enduring memory of all Americans who fought for a new world of freedom and peace.

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.  John 15:13

Dedicated July 4, 1960
Marfa History Club



Here is the other side of the monument, with the Honor Roll listings.



And here are the listing of the names for each war:


World War I:  Albert L. Curry - Carroll Farmer - Owen Sheilds - Lucius F. Hurley - Obie Walker



World War II:  Andres Aguilar - Reuben F. Allen - Salome G. Alvarado - Adolfo R. Baeza, Jr. - Diego Baeza - William H. Browning - Robert E. Colquitt - Joseph Deanda - Alejandro S. DeLeon - Frank A. Depuglio - Finis O. Donaldson - Benjamin F. Edwards - Robert E. Evans - Joseph H. Gardner - Henry W. Garnett - Roy Griffith - Alonzo Hernandez - S. C. Hernandez - Ogden Holloway - Russell N. Hyatt - Alberto P. Jimenez - Jose R. Jimenez - Ephraim F. King, Jr. - Dolores Levario - Delfin B. Lopez - Jesus Lujan - Jose P. Madrid - Benjamin R. Medley - John G. Minniece - Joe Morales - James C. Morrow - Roberto Munoz - Manuel Rodruguez - George E. Roman - John R. Simpson - R. L. Stevenson, Jr. - Jesus A. Tavarez - Joe G. Turner - Claudio Valenzuela



Korean ConflictCecil Estrada - Frank Salgado, Jr. - Dawn J. Stovall - Eduardo T. Tenorio

Vietnam Conflict:  Elijio Gonzales, Jr. - Juan Mario Mendias - Joe Henry Samaniego - Fred V. Jurado


Below is the south corner of the Presidio County Courthouse.  The Honor Roll monument can be seen in the lower left corner of the photograph/


This post is also part of the November 2021 Genealogy Blog Party.


© Amanda Pape - 2021 - e-mail me!

Saturday, November 6, 2021

Sympathy Saturday: It's Been Four Years



Frederick Henry Pape, February 4, 1929 - November 6, 2017, with unknown man


This image is from a Kodachrome slide I found, among others from Korea (1952-53) and of Pape family in Chicago (1953-1956), in a paper bag in my parents' study after he died rather suddenly three years ago today.  There are no markings on the slide to indicate place or date.  

However, I am pretty sure it was taken in Houston, Texas, outside 4632 Norhill Boulevard about 1953-1955.  

The date is based on Dad appearing to be wearing the same clothes as in another photo, also from a Kodachrome slide, taken sometime between 1953 and 1955 inclusive.

The location was determined with a guess.  My mother, Geraldine Margaret Guokas Pape, 1928-2019, was living at 4632 Norhill from at least 1951 (based on a city directory listing) until my parents married in September 1954.  It was the home of her mother, Sara Melzina Wolfe Guokas Archibald (1907-1997) and stepfather, Wallace Frankline "Archie" Archibald (1896-1970), from at least 1951 to at least 1955 (also based on city directories).

Notice the reddish brick house at the end of the street?  That's 1039 Le Green Street, at the corner of Le Green and Norhill, and it has distinctive brick arches on the front porch that helped me match it up with the 1950s view in the picture.



Dad and maybe George Kaiser - September 1954?


I'm not sure who the other man in the photo is.  He might be George Joseph Kaiser Jr. (1928-2006), a classmate of Dad's at Loyola Academy and Loyola University who also lived down the street (2415 W. Lunt in November 1946) in Chicago.  He was Dad's best man at my parents' September 1954 wedding.  This photo could have been taken just before that event.  Below are George and Dad at the wedding.



Best man George Kaiser Jr. and groom Fred Pape at Fred's wedding, 11 September 1954


I wish I'd found these slides sooner, so I could have asked Mom and Dad about them.  It's been four years now since I lost my dad, and I miss him.


© Amanda Pape - 2021 - e-mail me!