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Bert has a new car -- a 1954 Hudson Hornet -- so must take a picture of it while he and Iva visit someone in the cemetery. From my late father-in-law's father's slides. Bert worked for the railroad and loved his cars. They lived in Wausau, Wisconsin, but I'm not sure where this photo was taken. View full size.
The entry was added on March 10, so it is the same photo as this one. I had looked for it a couple days ago and it wasn't there.
The photo for Gladys Smith’s grave from FindAGrave seems to be from this slide. The angle is the same and the white flowers off to the left side seem to be growing in the same pattern.
Geez, so young. Back in those days if it wasn't car accidents, it was tuberculosis. Not sure if either of those was the cause of their early demise.
The cool thing about Pine Grove cemetery is that the majority of the 20th century monuments are made of a deep red colored granite that was quarried just a few miles outside of town. Its the reddest commercial granite in the US, but it was expensive to quarry- and the Wausau quarrying business eventually busted. But its beautiful stuff, and this cemetery demonstrates the local pride in the local product.
In the early 1950s the Hudson Hornet was tearing up the tracks in NASCAR. It was the ride to beat until about the time of this photo, when it was bested by the new Chrysler 300.
My dad bought one used and we loved it. It had so much room.
My paternal grandfather worked at the Hudson Motor Car factory on Jefferson Avenue in Detroit as a die-setter for 28 years. This 1954 model was the last car produced in that plant, which was abruptly closed that year following the merger of Hudson and Nash that created American Motors. Grandpa worked there until the very last day and drove his beautiful black 1952 Hudson into the early '60s.
To accentuate the family echoes, the people in this photo look an awful lot like my maternal grandparents, who also lived in Detroit (my grandpa on that side worked at Ford, and had several similar hats). My grandmother even shared the rather unusual name of Iva with the lovely lady pictured here.
This photo was taken in Pine Grove Cemetery in Wausau, as indicated by the grave for Mark E. Bellis (1896-1925) in background.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/40338235/mark-edward-bellis
Getting a new car in the 1950s was a major event. All the neighbors and family were informed. Here my parents are proudly showing off our new 1953 Plymouth at my brother's bar mitzvah. Dad had to pull out of the driveway on some pretext and drive around the block and of course Mom had to join him.
In Wisconsin they used to have cheese-colored license plates and wear white hats.
Now it is the opposite.
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