Tag: kitko

A boy and his dog for Sepia Saturday this week.  It was SUPER easy to match to the prompt photo this week since we have dozens and dozens (possibly hundreds) of photos of family pets from the Kitko side of the family.  Pictured here is my grandpa Leon Kitko and Tippy the dog.  The photo is dated 1946, so this means Leon was 13.  Location is in the yard of the family home in Beccaria, Pennsylvania – on the far left is the church we see in a number of other photos.  I’m not quite sure why the back of the photo is labelled twice – perhaps the pencil was starting to fade and was re-done in ink later.  On the label, Leon is called, “Buddy,” which was his childhood nickname.  In fact, it was such a commonly used nickname that, as the story goes, when he went to his first day of school, the teacher called his full name during roll call and he didn’t respond.  Being a small town, the teacher knew who he was already, so she asked him why he wasn’t responding.  He replied, “My name is Buddy, not Leon.”

Over the years the family had a number of pets, but there are quite a few photos of Tippy through the years which is nice to see.  Our pets have such short lives in comparison to ours, and it’s  nice to see that they held a prominent enough spot in the lives of my ancestors to make it into saved photos.

Well, after a very busy holiday season, I’m finally catching up on a back log of posting.  This is Sepia Saturday from before the annual winter break.  Seated in the chair, examining the manual for his new Polaroid Land Camera 250, is Leon Kitko, my grandfather.  The Christmas tree is decorated with garland and tinsel, and all the unwrapped gifts sit under the tree.  Christmas was a big deal for his second wife, Romayne (Greenaway) Kitko, and there are tons and tons of photos of the Christmases they spent together over the years.  I’m fairly certain the camera that goes with the manual followed me home in the last few years after Leon and Romayne both passed, so it’s neat to have this photo to connect it to Leon.  It’s also a photo I’d absolutely expect to see – Leon with the furrowed brow, intently reading a manual, feet up, dirty socks just pulled out of his work boots on the floor.  The date on the back of the photo is 25 December 1967, and the photo is a polaroid as well.

The prompt image for Sepia Saturday 308 featured a man walking along a  beach  with his dog.  I thought about it for a second, and since my family lived mostly  the center of Pennsylvania over the last 100 years, an area with no sandy beaches, I decided I had plenty of photos of men with dogs and took the easy way out this week!  Pictured above is Leon Kitko with “Tramp.”  The back of the photo says that it  was taken in May 1971 and that Tramp was Lynn Adams’ dog.  If I’ve got my facts right, the dog wasn’t Lynn Adams’ for very long and Leon basically ended up adopting the dog since he  spent more time with Leon than anyone else.  There are bunches of photos of Tramp in the collection of Polaroids from the 1970s proving that he was a beloved pet and companion for a number of years.  Anyone who has had a family dog knows exactly what I’m talking about, and we have two rescue pups who share our home.  Just like grandpa, we’ve taken countless photos of our dogs and share them with anyone (and everyone).  While people  might think it’s odd to save photos of grandpa’s pets, I feel a sort of nostalgia for them even though I never knew any of these pets.  Beyond that, the photos work to paint a bigger picture about the sort of person Grandpa was – all the photos of pets show he was an animal lover.  To me, they’re not just a mass of photos of pets, but photos taken with love to remember a life shared with furry companions.