Janek and Julia and Eugeniusz and Casimir

These two are the same lady, posed and photographed by the same photographer:

The face, features, and expression are the same, to my eyes.  As for the other changes, I could easily see them as the work of time and placek.  I mean no disrespect to my Grandma, here; au contraire, I fantasize about having conversations with this grandmother I never met in which we confide and laugh about many subjects.  But to go on . . .

Here she is again.  I think.

My current skill set allows us to zoom in this much:

Shape of face, nose, and mouth encourage me to run with this some more.  Let's say these are Julia, Victoria, Ludwig, Frank, and the young Casimir.  Why not?  Gene is at Orchard Lake and Casey basks as the only child at home.  Here he is a little closer in:

Surely this is the same cute kid, with the same cute ears and all, a couple of years later:

Gene and Casey on the front porch. The college man and the young teen. This is May Street in Buffalo, right?

If we accept this chain of evidence we no longer need feel we must search NYC for long-lost relatives.  We can still wonder quite entertainingly what-all Frank did on those trips to the City, besides take pictures.

Janek and Julia

This studio wedding portrait is a large print, 12" by 18", hand-cut, on the heavy stock that JPZ typically used.  It was somewhat bent and a little torn when it came out of the storage carton.  Still, it scanned all right - in four parts, which Peter Ehrlich then PhotoShopped into unity, integrity, and suavity.  Thanks, Peter.

Remember, a click on the photo will open it nice and big in Preview.

I think we can agree that this lady

and this lady

are the same, can we not?

They are Julia Mostkowska Zdrojewska.  Therefore, the groom is John Peter Zdrojewski.

And since this must be JPZ (the only groom she had),

this must be JPZ as well:

But I'm not done rocking JFZ's world for today!  The next post will add Eugene and Casimir to this controversy.  

Remember, "labels" for posts are listed on the right sidebar.  For example, if one wanted to review Julia photos, one could click on the "Julia" label there, and be rewarded with all posts having that label loaded onto one new page of Gene and Clara's.

Juliana

More on "Wartime"

     JFZ, aka Johnny Electronics, writes as follows:

     "Julie,

I believe this is May Street. Dad and I tore out the archway perhaps in the early sixties. The door to his right is the hallway to the front door on the porch. But that hallway also served as his darkroom. Remember?"

     Bingo! John, that solves the mystery of my puzzlement about that archway.  May Street was familiar, but the archway I never saw when I was old enough to retain memory of it.  Have you read much Agatha Christie?  There's a short story in which the heroine, visiting a house for the first time, as she thinks, absently gets up and starts to walk into a wall.  At the end of the tale - once they've found the body buried in the garden - she figures out that she visited the house as a child, when French doors were in that wall.  This is a kind of converse of that story!

     That was heedless, tearing out that archway.  Not only was it the product of good American craftsmanship, it is a classic design element.  You can see those lines in the Parthenon.  Look, if you concentrate on the outline of the entire arch, you can reverse the image in your mind.  When you do that, you see the outlines of one half of each of two columns, one on the left and one on the right.  It was all done on purpose, to make pleasing masses and pleasing spaces between the masses.  There are galleries of these all around the porches of classical temples.

    You can enlarge this image quite easily if you are viewing it with Safari or Mail on a Mac.  Click on it.  Specifically, left-click once.

     And that ain't all.  Look at two the lines of sight - perspective lines -  that emanate from the top and the bottom, respectively, of the case clock.  Follow them as they converge to their focal - or vanishing - point.  They converge on John Zdrojewski.   

     He's stoically bearing up under the prick of Time's arrow.

JFZ continues:  "You have a great picture here. It makes me very nostalgic for the way America used to be, quite united in both peace and war."

     "By the way, Casey did not attend Orchard Lake. And during WWII he may have been in his early years at St. John Kanty in Erie. But, he did spend his freshman year at Kenzington High."

     Thanks, John.  I wonder what year Casey was at Kensington High.  My Mom, Clara Matynka Zdrojewska -  let's now dub her CAMZ for this blog - graduated Kensington in 1947.  Let's see, would that have been about ten years after Uncle Casey's freshman year there?  Wish we had more dates.  I have a CAMZ Ken yearbook and some prom stories.  So keep reading. 

     

Paul Zadner has written thus:

     "This is May Street. All the photos are taken in front of that window and he had a dark room for photos to the door on the right. I also remember the radiator but not the archway but those arches were very common, because I remember wall papering them."

     Thanks, Paul.  Indeed that front window appeared in the very first post on this blog.  (That's a link:  Go for it!)

     The door on the right I recall as the way to the front entrance of the house.  It led to the front porch on the one hand, and on the other hand it ought to have led to the front stairs to the upstairs apartment. Did the darkroom equipment obscure those stairs?  Not so good for fire escape!

     I do not recall the darkroom at all. Maybe I was too short, or maybe I was kept away from it for fear that proximity to lab equipment would shrivel my ovaries; who knows.

     Description of the darkroom - where did that enlarger come from that Marty had in Marilla? - would be wonderful.  Stump up, John, Paul, Marty!  Skip over to blog website, then click on the "Comments" link at the bottom of this post, and run wild.

Little Joodgie

"Wartime"

     JPZ was a man always ready to set up a photoshoot.  This print has no labeling, so we study and infer.

     Is this the downstairs apartment on May Street?  I don't recognize or remember that archway.  Was it the house on St. Louis Street, which I never saw?

     John Zdrojewski, our JPZ, is alone in this photo.  He has posed himself as the only human figure, but not prominent. The objects surrounding him are prominent.  They define and describe his situation.

     He is seated quietly, studying a scrapbook.  He is relaxed in an armchair, yet he is formally dressed and exhibits sober attitude and posture.  So, his situation is a bit formal and sober, even though domestic.  I think I recognize the scrapbook as the one that has come down to us, of his son Eugene's own photos of his Second World War service experience.  The photo portrait on the wall is of Gene in uniform, right there by the Flag.

     The other framed item, a religious print, features light streaming in through the window of a church.  That image is used often in paintings to symbolize the Holy Spirit, the "Light that Shines in the Darkness."

     All that is in the background.  The vast middle ground consists of empty living room.  JPZ is showing us how empty the house is.

     I wish we knew some more dates.  Were there years during which Julia was dead, Gene was at war, and Casey was away at school St. John Kanty's?  Empty living room, indeed.

     The grandfather clock is the star of the foreground, and perhaps of the entire scene.  Time certainly rules this space for this man.  He has to make it through - how much time?  for the war to end, and then - what will life be like then?

     JPZ, cabinetmaker and descendant of cabinetmakers, made that clock.  He was just finishing it up on the kitchen table of the house on St. Louis Street when his firstborn, Eugene, entered the world.  Now he and the clock wait for the return of that child.

     Julie