For Sepia Saturday this week, our prompt image features a soldier eating a donut. I’d been itching to include the above photo for quite a while, so I decided to go with the theme of eating and include it! The folks in the photo are clearly having a good time, and you can almost hear the laughter burst out of the image. It’s actually a double exposure, and the back has the label, “English Lesson.” At first I had a good laugh – if this is an English lesson, sign me up! Then I realized that you can see a bookcase, names on a chalk board, and students hunched over their desks in the far left of the photo. The foreground of people laughing and drinking out of glasses is definitely a second exposure. From the names on the board, it appears that this was taken after the Jaarsma family arrived in the USA from the Netherlands, so sometime after 1951. I have to imagine that the more jovial scene was in a dark restaurant or cafe that allowed the other image with the bookcases and chalkboard to show up in the spots the flash didn’t touch. I don’t recognize any faces, but the names on the chalkboard are clearly readable, at least a few of them. The class would’ve been somewhere in Northern New Jersey near Paterson, and a quick search on Ancestry.com led me to find an Elvira Lucaire living in Ridgewood, NJ in 1960, and she may be the Ellie Lucaire on the chalkboard list. I’m including the other names here in the case that the magic of the internet brings someone looking for their ancestor to this photo! Janet Lehmann, Ellie Lucaire, Marge Lesch, Marilyn Kozlowski, Liz Lee, Nancy Kime, Muriel Knapp, Dot Lynch.
The ghost quality adds movement to what was clearly a fun evening. I hope you get contacted by a descendant.