When My Ship Comes In

For my Facebook friends, you've seen this photo before: it's my profile pic. This photo also lives on as a chapter opener in a college textbook that my company used to publish. It is a book about writing, and the chapter deals with memoirs and how a picture can tell a story. My friend was a designer at the time and he created these thought bubbles and added them to the image for the marketing brochure (in the book it shows just the photo). How funny that I'm actually writing about it now!

There are so many photos of the three of us when we were young, I can't imagine being able to share them all. In almost all of them we seem pretty happy so this one is an exception, and maybe that's why I like it. The super pout. I can still make that face when I don't get my way. There were several images taken on this day at the beach; my dad probably decided to take a dip after work and took us down to the beach with my mother. I'm just not sure why my parents thought this would be a good picture. But, then, maybe that was the point. It's a great picture.

Mr. Johnson was a neighbor of ours on Miles Road and he worked for Texaco. My brothers took part in a photo shoot for Texaco, promoting the toy tankers they were selling for $3.98 with the purchase of eight gallons of gasoline. That sounds like a lot for a toy, especially when gas was only $0.30/gallon at the time, or $2.40 for 8 gallons. Can you imagine that now? So my brothers each got to keep a tanker as a gift for being incredibly cute models. And of course, only boys would be interested in tankers, right? Ah, but that's another story.

Here are a few pics in that series. I'm not sure which one made it into the Texaco archives. And just so you're not all feeling terribly sorry for me, check out the last photo here. It seems my brothers shared with me after all!