Family

Finding Dad's Mille Miglia Photographs

For years, I knew that my father had been in Italy during his Army service in the mid 1950’s. While cleaning the family home this past year, I’ve had to sort through boxes and boxes of photographs, slides, family albums and ephemera from the Marstons and McMillans. 

Tucked away among old family photographs and negatives, was a small collection of 3x5” black and white pictures of old sports cars in what looked like a race.

Letter from May 20, 1945

May 20, 1945

Dear Buster:

At long last the letter I've promised for so long.

I recently was going through old photos and scanning interesting things. One thing that I’d had in my possession for years but never looked at was a swim meet program that my Great Aunt Ethel sent to her brother Ted (my grandfather).

The Marstons lived in Honolulu from around 1910-1935? Ted, Ethel, Stan and Warren were all active in local schools, attended McKinley High School and swam for the Outrigger Canoe Club.

After years of no maintenance on a weirdly growing set of redwood trees at the Santa Cruz house, we started to get a failure in the fence. The debris was pushing the fence into the neighbors yard. 

We had gardeners try to keep it clean, but it really needed a stump grinding. We hired StumpKing and Kyle got the job done.

Here's before and after.

Began the year with a trip out to the Seymour Center to play with the touch tanks.

Replaced the patio uplights that had been installed in the new patio in 2012. The constant moisture and exposure had dulled the lights and in some cases they were shorted out. So we bought replacements and I rewired them back up. Here's a before, during and after look.

The year began with a trip to Palm Springs where we stayed in La Quinta for the Palm Springs Dog show. The desert is great in January and I got some nice bike rides in and around the region.

We came home to an atmospheric river event that showed us where some new engineering would be needed for our grave paths. The storms also dropped a huge douglas fir onto other trees blocking our route, power and internet for about a week.