A Great Day

We keep saying, “We need to pull the plug.” “We need to stop running all over acquiring photos.” “But…” It is that “But” which always seems to keep us going. One more picture, one more gem, one more discovery… What might we find? What might we learn? How might we be amazed? Thus we crammed two meetings in yesterday.

The first was with Ann Basye and her mother Mary Alice Johnson Basye. We met them in the family’s over one hundred year old farm house. If that wasn’t perfect enough, workers were outside busily restoring the accompanying barn. Pictures, stories, wonderful people, all reasons we keep not stopping! It was a fabulous meeting and we got some great pictures. But one of our favorites has to be this one:

Guess where that is. It is inside the Carnation Creamery! The perfect accompaniment to our cover photo! We also got some great family and farm shots. We can’t thank the Basyes enough for inviting us into their home and being so warm, welcoming and generous.

Next we dashed over to Concrete to meet with Skagit County Historian Dan Royal. We got to swap stories about the struggles of book writing/compiling. He recently worked on “Bridgeside: Selected Stores of Dick Fallis Skagit County Historian” (we happily purchased two copies of our own, if you are interested, the book is being sold at the Skagit County Historical Museum in La Conner) and is currently finishing up a MASSIVE Skagit County genealogy project that will be a two volume collection. It would have been worth the trip simply to meet Dan and get copies of his latest book, but we got a few nice photos from him too.

To sum up, a great day! But at some point we simply must curb our obsession.

That Wasn’t Two Weeks Already?

Just noticed that the last post was over two weeks ago! As our final deadline approaches time is apparently speeding up exponentially! Sadly, no information came in about our mystery folks. But we have had some successes of late. We had a great meeting with Mike of Mike and Jean’s Berry Farm. There was also a lot to be learned at the Skagit Valley College Library. And tomorrow we have two meetings set that might be amazing—keeping our fingers crossed.

There has also been a flurry of writing. The book introduction and intros for chapters 1-5 have been penned and sent to our publisher. We are praying they are good enough to not need many edits.

Meanwhile the PR wheels are spinning. We might be making an appearance at an upcoming event in downtown Mount Vernon, but before committing we want to see if Arcadia’s PR department can help us. If it all comes together we’ll be sure to make an announcement!

Long story short, the book is our paramount priority. We’ve got a hard push before us, but once it is over it is over. Then we can get back to fun blogging.

Behind, so Behind…

Wait, it hasn’t really been almost two months without a post has it? Oh yes it has. Summer presents new struggles as we now have to balance full-time children and family vacations with our book project. To put it simply time is flying! It is flying so fast that we are both trying desperately to not hit Panic Mode as book deadlines quickly approach.

One thing that kept us busy was going through even MORE negatives! There were three batches when all was said and done and each box got bigger and bigger. We would love to know how many negatives we looked through in all (Jessica is estimating around ten thousand!). We neatly arranged everything back into new boxes and returned several more boxes than what had been lent. The final batch of negatives is hopefully being processed at Arcadia as I type.

There was some good news too! The best news might be that someone is actually reading our blog! Turns out it was our good friend Joan (pronounced Jo-Ann) and she identified the girls in the roller rink photo we posted. Unfortunately for us, the rink, called the “Roller Frolic” was in Burlington, not Mount Vernon. The girls are Donnajean, Marilyn and Kathleen Eddie. Their parents, Bill and Burl, were the owners of the rink. Our greatest apologies if we spelled any of the names incorrectly. So there you go future Burlington historians, valuable information.

And while we’re on a roll, let’s try it again. Does anyone recognize either of these two people?

The envelope might say “Warren”, but it is very difficult to make out. Based on the number code we can place the time frame around 1950. Don’t know why, but these portraits caught our eye, especially the prim and proper disposition, as well as the hat, of that lovely lady. And is that a crop duster behind her? Just seems like there is a story here…