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Gig Harbor Now and Then | Behind the Finds: Every picture has a story (even if I have to make one up)

In general, introductory paragraphs are supposed to be fairly smooth and at least logical. The following is the opposite:

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Photographs are the core of today’s Gig Harbor Now and Then column. Another word for a photograph is image. One way of forming an image is by imagining. In today’s column we’re going to start with old photographs, apply some imagining, and see if we can’t figure out the story they tell.

Yes, that opening is ridiculously contrived and hokey, but no worse than what we’re going to do with today’s featured photographs. A lot can be read into certain old pictures, and we’ve selected a few just for that purpose.

Old photos can be fascinating. Even ones that are unidentified and undated can be a stimulant to the imagination. But finding interesting, random, old photographs can sometimes be a bit of a challenge. While you can find some really interesting items at a junk store, you don’t normally find really cool old photos there. Usually you need to go just a little bit upscale. The ones featured today were found not at a junk store, but at a rather nice collectables store, Josephine’s Mercantile in Port Orchard, on a very cold day in February of this year.

Tonya Strickland and I both hand-picked a variety of old snapshots, and she too is writing about some of them in a series of columns on Gig Harbor Now. She has titled her series Behind the Finds: Every Photo Has a Story.

Tonya will tell the stories we’ve found behind the pictures, while I’ll feature some of the more interesting photos for which we couldn’t find any information. Accordingly, the title of this week’s Gig Harbor Now and Then is Behind the Finds: Every Photo Has a Story, Even if I Have to Make One Up.

As we have discovered, the people who originally owned the pictures we’re using passed away, leaving no survivors who gave a pootie-toot for their family’s lineage. The photo albums were left behind in a house that was sold.

That’s bad news to family members out of the loop who would’ve cherished owning the history they represent. But the good news is that Tonya is telling the stories we’ve been able to find, and the entire staff at Gig Harbor Now and Then — all of me — dedicated part of an entire day to piece together hypothetical stories that the rest of them tell, so nothing has really been lost.

In fact, the ones featured in this column today probably tell more of a story now than they did before they were reluctantly torn from the carefully arranged albums they were lovingly glued into, and sold piecemeal for a buck or two to random shoppers (like Tonya and I) who somehow find something worthwhile in them.

A picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words, and while I won’t get that many out of these, I’ll get plenty. It’s amazing what a discerning eye, critical thinking, and just plain human intuition can come up with. While the following interpretations may not be 100% accurate, how far off could they really be?

Passing the hat

This wonderful story begins with a friendly, older group of seemingly ordinary people playing that perennial favorite party game, Musical Hats. Two photos illustrate the sheer joy of randomly swapping brow sweat, dandruff, and head lice.

As a readers’ aid, I’ve diagramed the madcap action of this unexpectedly wild bunch, below. Makes you sorry you didn’t get in on the fun, doesn’t it?

Those are two of only four pictures in today’s column that are dated. In fact, the two are dated twice. Although obviously taken on the same day, probably within minutes of each other, they carry the conflicting dates of 1942 and July 4, 1945. Which is right? Who knows? Are either of them right?

Plausible deniability

Another picture taken at the same spot in June 1950, with only some of the same people, shows one woman attempting to mask her true identity.

Why would she do that, while obviously among friends? Maybe because the yokel behind her is her soused spouse, holding his wine bottle in higher esteem than her?

And what kind of salacious behavior is going on at the left side of that picture?!

An unfunny practical joke

Long before the Heimlich maneuver was invented, loud, brash, ham-handed, gap-toothed Aunt Molest-ar invented her own invasive physical technique which, instead of dislodging food in a choking victim, usually caused an expulsion of foul language. There was no practical reason for her to sneak up behind someone and harshly squeeze them just below the ribcage, so swearing is perfectly understandable. For that matter, a punch to the nose would be equally appropriate. Unfortunately none of the photos we found pictured that reciprocal gesture, so we’re left with a much milder reaction. Here, while Aunt Molest-ar is doing her shtick, Auntie Grump is trying to smile through her anger and discomfort, with limited success.

Secret ingredient

Slow-moving, mild-mannered Great Uncle Cirrhosis was always an amiable drunk, but could cause considerable trouble without even trying (or thinking). His go-to excuse was “Fergot muh reading glasses at home.”

That abdication of responsibility didn’t always play well. A full view of the same picture shows Cousin Vinny “The Enforcer” Vendetta coming after him with a baseball bat during a family picnic for repeatedly spitting tobacco juice into the salsa bowl.

Predicting the future

As the puppy cradled in his left arm yawns, kindly old Grandpa Smith, in his characteristic bib overalls, gestures towards the camera with a gloved hand and says to little Ellie Mae, “Look — 2025 Gig Harbor wants to see your pretty face, darlin’.”

He was a very forward thinker.

Zero for three

Humorless Uncle Theodopolis Bach Assward was so proud of his embroidered loincloth invention that he never left home without it. The purpose of The Flycatcher, he said, was to eliminate men’s embarrassment over leaving their zippers down.

The Flycatcher failed to sell. Wearing such a gaudy fashion accessory was at least as embarrassing as an open fly, if not more so. It was an improvement of sorts over his previous attempt to solve the same problem, however. His first try was to attach one of his cuff links to his trouser zipper. That way, when the open-fly business was concluded and the arm raised, it would be closed automatically. The downside was that every time the arm was dropped, down went the zipper. The Zippity-Do-Done never made it past the prototype stage.

His next invention, a side-by-side pedal-powered paddle-wheel pontoon boat didn’t catch on either, despite — or perhaps because of — the name he gave it, the Pe-Po Pa-Whee Toon. As the photo clearly shows, he was so angry with his sisters for their lackluster performance on a trial run that he cut both their heads off. He went to prison for that.

Deep water

Uncle Waders, too, was an odd duck. A slow and plodding worker, he liked to fell small trees with a carpenter’s saw. And he had an unnatural predisposition for wearing hip boots. Not just when he was fording thigh-high water, but all the time.

He even wore his hip boots on Sunday picnics — while clutching his cherished Teddy bear close to his heart.

Uncle Wader’s multiple peculiarities so embarrassed Aunt Humiliatia that she couldn’t even look at the camera.

That damning piece of evidence is dated June 1950.

Could Uncle Waders’ crotch-high rubber boot obsession have been mere subterfuge to hide a predilection for wearing Aunt Humiliatia’s pantyhose? Sometimes we just can’t find the answers. Other times we don’t want to. This is one of those times.

Half-baked nickname

Uncle Les had a life-long tendency towards laziness. In the Navy he was known as Lester the Loafer.

Lester’s picture comes with a complimentary vintage fingerprint. Unless the snapshot was taken by a very special camera, it seems highly unlikely it’s one of his.

Shallow water

Moody and brooding Cousin Angst saw himself as another James Dean. The rest of the family saw him as a clueless knucklehead who’d stand in ankle-deep water for hours at a time, waiting to be discovered by Hollywood.

Dambusters

Cousin Atrium watches intently to see if castor oil doughnut holes will unbind her mother.

Auto garnish

After years of working menial jobs for others, Cousin Simpal was finally living his dream as a professional hood ornament. The dream died a sudden death not long after this picture was taken, when his lunch was gone and his Thermos went dry. Plus, he really had to go to the bathroom after all that coffee.

Satisfaction achieved

It’s a good feeling, restoring people’s little stories from random photographs found in second-hand stores. Either that, or I made it all up; I can’t remember which.

In any case, the people in today’s pictures are now known to a wider audience. Who knows, with the unlimited reach of the internet, maybe descendants of some of those people will find their images online. Without any names attached, it’s a very long shot at best. But it would be pretty cool.

Update

The preceding was written before Tonya and I made any effort to discover the photo subjects’ actual lives. Once started, the quest for some of the people’s real stories didn’t take long. For various reasons, this was one of those times where progress was made very quickly.

I first found photographs for sale at Josephine’s Mercantile in Port Orchard in October of 2024. I mentioned it to Tonya, who expressed interest in seeing them. Four months passed before we could both arrange time to go there, and when we finally did, things happened pretty fast.

The timeline went like this: On a Monday, we went to Josephine’s and found a small pile of pictures that hadn’t been there on my previous visit. After sifting through them, we each purchased a few select ones, and I started writing this column. By the end of Tuesday it was nearly finished. On Wednesday, we independently put in the work to find the real stories, and after an exchange of texts comparing notes, had most of the framework and many of the details in place by the end of the evening.

From there it was a matter of chasing down strong leads and determining how to present the adventure in our respective Gig Harbor Now columns. As the newspaper reporter she has always been, Tonya chose to play it straight. By that time it was too late for me, having all but finished this column. It would be a shame to waste it … wouldn’t it? Well, that’s what I told myself, which convinced me to leave well enough alone.

Besides, we never did find out the identity of most of the people in the photos I used, so there wasn’t much to change in my column. We assumed the unidentified ones must be friends and relatives of the people profiled in Tonya’s story, but many names could not be found.

Full disclosure

Yes, I know that Uncle Theodopolis Bach Assward’s Flycatcher is actually a Masonic apron. Jean Hannah, the Collections Manager at the Harbor History Museum, tipped me off to that well before publication. But not before I’d written this column, so the Flycatcher stayed.

The goof hoisting the wine bottle is not the husband of the woman wearing the big nose and glasses. Her husband is standing to her left. We don’t know either of their names, but they appear as a couple in another photo.

We ultimately figured out that Uncle Waders is Don Wolford. And he didn’t always wear hip boots. Sometimes he found casual satisfaction in knee boots, which, as everyone in the fashion world knows, are the Bermuda shorts of rubber boots.

And Cousin Atrium turned out to be Doris Persing Wolford, but that caption was simply too good to give up.

Oh — and here’s the final pose of Grandpa Smith and Ellie Mae, neither of whom we were able to properly identify. Too bad, because it’s the best photo of the bunch.

— Greg Spadoni, March 24, 2025