According to my banker, Iowa is one of the few states to require that every house have what they call an, “abstract”, or a record of all hands it has been through, mortgage activity, etc. So, when we bought our current house, we got a very neat little folder with pages describing every transaction on our house since 1940 which is rather neat. I thought I would share the first page of our house’s abstract, detailing the first recorded transfer in 1940.

Note the mortgage for $1,200 — I guarantee you we didn’t pay that in 2005! (more like 40+ times that amount)

I was never known to be a fat kid, but apparently all children go through a phase in which they are a bit on the rolly-polly side of things. After all, they do call it “baby fat” for a reason.

In this photograph, yours truly is only a few weeks old, being held upright by my mother’s hand underneath what appears to be the remains of a rather unfortunate polar bear. Note the deep “Pralle dimple” in my chin and the rolls on my arms competing with one another to see who can be the next wrist. The best part is the expression on my face. I am either trying to decide if the photographer is a complete idiot or I am working on a diaper-filling event; I’m unsure which applies.

My mother has never been an unfortunate-looking person, but when she was younger, she was downright cute. In this clipping from the November 1st, 1959 Des Moines Register, you can see my mom in the lower-right-hand corner, grinning away between her ringlets. Although you cannot see it, the dress she is wearing is one that my parents eventually had my sister model when she was a similar age and got photographs of it, hanging them up together on the wall — mother and daughter in a spitting-image contest.

I think the other participants are equally as interesting. I’m unsure as to what is on the kid’s head in the upper left corner photograph, but I’m pretty sure that my offspring will never be seen in a bonnet with Peter Cottentail’s hind end sitting on top. The upper right-hand picture is also very curious. Nowadays it doesn’t seem out of place, but remember, this is 1959, well before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so I’m sure the placement of a black baby in a predominantly white newspaper was something of an anomaly (perhaps not, but this is my perception).