A WINDOW TO THE PAST

 

This photo tells it all. For me, its like having a window into the past.

 

It is one of my favorite photos and it appears on page 77 of my book "La Nostra Costa  (Our Coast) [LNC]. It is captioned "BRONCO IN HIS RANCERE OUTFIT C.1950". I took this photo from the inside of our bedroom in our old house on the Gulch Ranch. In it you can see "Bronco", my father, like he would be dressed to go to work each morning. In the background to the right you can see the clothesline that my mother hung clothes to dry. Capi, our dog, appears to be watching for something. And to the left with the "Keep Out" sign on the door is the club house where my brother and I kept and read our "Funny Books" . And where we played Italian songs [some with a Fascist flare to them]  on an  old  stand up Victrola phonograph. [LNC : pages 145-147]

You can also see the enclosed chicken yard where we kept our chickens. Inside that chicken yard to the left, out of view, is where Bronco almost got arrested as an Alien Spy, while feeding our rabbits in their hutches, during a WW II Blackout. [LNC: Pages 30-31]  All of this is gone now, except for the distant field. BTW: Near the top of the photo, horizontally across along where the crops end, is part of the race course my brother John and I took when racing in the "Old Carrettone", our old family car.[LNC: Pages 261-263]