My Family......

The Sepia Saturday bloggers are celebrating the fact that they are still being on board after 199 posted blog weeks. To remember the past as well as to honor it, we have continued to post pictures and words for everyone to enjoy.

This is a reposted blog from the year 2010.  I joined the Sepia Saturday group in February of 2010.  It is entitled "My Family..." which is a posting of everyone before I was born.

My older brothers doing their thing in the front yard.

Ronald James Burgus looks into the camera while his younger brother Rex Thomas Burgus checks out the person taking the photo.  While my dad was in the service in Washington D.C. and then in Europe, these guys and mom lived with Grandma Brown, mom's mother.  This is in Murray, Iowa and I suspect the year is 1945.  Ron would be 16 months older and I think he looks close to being four years old here. The house in which they are sitting still stands today, except some time after they lived there the owner removed the second story and made it look like a ranch house.

Back row: Zella Marie Brown Burgus, Dwight Burgus and Jesse Thomas Burgus

Front row: Rex and Ron Burgus

After dad returned from the war,  Dwight Lee  was born in Feb. 1947.  At first my dad worked as a mechanic, repairing tractors.  He then made his move to become a farmer.  They rented a farm in which dad would give up half of the crop for the rent. This photo is taken out on that farm, south of Murray, near a little town called Hopeville.  Someday I will blog about Hopeville. 

Click on the picture and enjoy the chicken in the background. One also can see the photographer and friend is in the picture by checking out the shadow.

 Dwight, Rex, the border collie, and Ron

This photo was taken out on the rented farm in 1949 or 50. It was south of Murray, Iowa. I was born in 1950 and I think Dwight looks almost three here. I could have been born by then but I really didn't remember living on that farm except for a few times when I was three years old. One story I have heard from the family about the dog was that he was so protective of his family and no one else was welcomed on the property. A border collie is such a loyal dog and he was lost when we moved to a new farm in 1953.

Today Ron owns a printing company in Mesa, Arizona and Rex co-owns with two partners a company that make trailers for recreation vehicles in California.  Dwight started his working life as a construction worker, working as a contractor for building companies in Mesa, Arizona.  As his addictions continued in his life he demoted himself to being a drywall installer and then a part time carpenter. He had to start living with my parents back in Osceola, Iowa in his later years.  My father died in 2000, age 82 and my mom passed away in 2008, age 89 years, three months after her death my brother Dwight died. He was 61 years old.

As I create these blogs I find it difficult to edit and cut them to a reasonable size.  Of course I know so much more about this era and I can't begin to touch it.  And yet it is satisfying to put it down and to share it.  The photos do speak volumes and that is what makes Sepia Saturday so fulfilling. If I am weak in spirit on the day that I write, the photos help me save face.  I do so enjoy being a part of this process and have grown so much in my ability to observe and to express the past world around me. 

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A Quandry.........

The entire facebook group from Murray, Iowa are all in a tizzy.  What they thought that it was, isn't. An older photo of a drugstore on main street of Murray was identified as the Coleman's Drug Store.  It does look a little bit like it but it isn't,  The great nephew of the owner of that store says it is not his uncles place of business.  I actually think it is the store across the street, Power's Drug.  There were actually two drug stores, no pharmacists worked in either store, while I was in high school.  The 60's was the era that they both were in business and one of them could have originally looked like this.  I remember they both had back doors to the store rooms. One of them had built in shelves with sliding glass doors that would hold asprin and other cold medicines.  Laxatives and lotions for bee bites and things like that lined the shelves.

There is a guy sitting there with his suitcase which tells me he is waiting for a train. The woman in the back must be cleaning the tables.  The window at the back would have gone to the alley which makes it the other drugstore.  Both places of business did have swirling seats at the counter when I was young and those could have been added later of course.

All in all it is a fun photo.  It is a piece of history that has been captured in time.  What time we don't know but it looks like all of those kind of business back in the early 1900's.  The fun part will be if the folks my age will eventually have a person speak up and tell us the real identity of the business in Murray, Iowa.

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Murray, Iowa.........

Murray, Iowa was incorporated in 1880.  Its largest population was 876 people during the 1920s.  It has shrunk in size throughout the years and now is back up to around 700 people. Murray was my hometown even though I actually was from the farm.  My ancestors met and married each other surround this town and Germans and Brits connected to created large families.  Burgus, Abernathy, Turner, Reis are a few of the names I have in my family tree from around Murray.  These were all from my dad's side as my mom's side came from the Lorimor, Iowa.

The location of the tracks are still the same today as the Amtrak now runs on these tracks. The tracks go all the way to California.  The depot is long gone.  Even so the history of the building has so many stories of people who were killed on this exact location.  Older people would walk along the crossing next the building and would look the one way but not see the train coming from the other direction.   I actually had a distant cousin that was killed on this track probably 50 years ago.  I know all that seems to be confusing as I too think that they should hear a train coming.  I do know during my youth an older lady was hit there but she was probably not knowing where she was and what to look for while outside or should I say confused.

The train station was torn down in the late 60's. The grainery in the background is also gone. The whole set up was for shipping of grain and also was the mail train. A person could post a card in Murray in the morning and the person in the next town could receive it.  They could then reply to the card and send it back to Murray in the afternoon on a returning train.

I am familiar with this main street as it was all standing when I was growing up in the area.  The corner fron building became the post office in later years.  It looks like it could be a barber shop in the photo. A grocery store sat next to it.  The post office is still there today and the grocery store closed a few years back.  The next two sets of buildings are not standing now.  I am assuming fire took them out.

This building always fascinated me.  It sat empty most of my life as a youth.  I never really noticed that the lodge was above the store until I saw this photo.  I always seemed like a large building to me and I never understood why they couldn't keep business going it. I do know it would be hard in a small town.

My uncle Carl owned the building in the foreground. The photo was taken I believe in the late sixties.  The major section of the buildings between the two buildings burned down in 1967. It had a movie theater there plus an empty store and a closed drug store. If you wanted to find the building in the top photo you can't as this building was added on the main street later after the photo was taken.

 Uncle Carl bought the building before I was born in the late 40's.  The first door was an entrance to a fancy barber shop with two barbers running the place.  The next set of windows shows where my Uncle and Aunt lived in an apartment.  They lived basically on main street with Venetian blinds separating them from the people walk down the street.  I remember my Aunt Pauline watching every move of everyone going by that set of windows.  The next set of windows  and door had another barber shop and then a laundromat.  The whole building originally was a dealership for  Model T's and the windows were display areas for cars.  The building was large with the garage being in the back of it.  I remember a cafe originally was in the place of the laundromat.

Memory lane today for me as I have borrowed these photos from a friend on facebook.  I have one more photo that will be a blog in itself to come in the future.

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