OK, I have one.
When my step-father "stepped in," when I was about nine, the whole extended family thing went "POOF!" He didn't asspciate much with anyone, so we didn't either. What familial associations I'd begun to build halted and everything was new and different. He has pretty much disowned his own family and was adopted, so we became pretty isolated from our greatest influences - grandparents.
This is my maternal grandfather, Otto Kenneth Hennsinger, Cooper (not "Cooperstown), Ohio. This photo appears in the book, "Sittin' On a Stump," by "Col." Raymond C. Vietzen, C1968. Vietzen visited my grandpa fairly frequently, as Vietzen was an amateur archeologist and my grandpa was a "horse-trader," extraordinaire - trading horses and everything else. He was pretty famous for always getting the better of whomever he was trading with, but no one eve seemed to get mad at him about it. Duck decoys, guns, buggies, antiques, relics,... Vietzen always dressed in a suit, stetson and wore a bolo tie. As a kid, I thought he was some kind of special agent or marshal and avoided him. WHY I thought I had to steer clear as a six-year-old, I don't know, but he seemed "sketchy" to me. I didn't know about this book until I was probably forty, when my mom found a copy and bought it for me. She also thought he was "sketchy" and thought the stories in this book were a bit tawdry, and waited until I was "an adult" (FORTY??) to share this with me.
My grandparents were very traditional, still had an outhouse, carried water in from the well, lived a basic and frugal lifestyle. They had an antique store and the harness shop and my grandpa was always turning a buck one creative way or another. That harness shop is gone now. That stitching pony mysteriously disappeared after he died in 1977. I wish I knew where it went, because I learned to stitch leather on the very stitching pony in the attached photo. I know everyone calls them a "stitching horse," but I was told it was a "stitching pony" when I was young. The smells of leather and old oak (antiques) makes me feel very nostalgic. Hearing bees-waxed thread squeak through leather makes me feel very nostalgic. Sore fingers make me nostalgic. I'm not the best leather-worker, but I surely enjoy doing it, because it takes me back to a day when people were self-sufficient and could repair old things, make new things and appreciate what they had.
Looking at this picture, I can smell the air, feel the coolness from the vitreous tile walls and feel the grit and leather bits underfoot on the not-so-smooth, cracked concrete floor. The cousin who taught me to stitch on that pony passed last year - covid. He was a bit of a hippie and a hot-rodder all his life, but he never let go of the traditional things grandpa taught us directly or indirectly.
Oh,
@JWFilips ! There is a picture of a young Wes Kindig on the opposite page to the one this is on. Last time I was in the Log Cabin Shop (a very long time ago), I think he was still alive. His son was running the shop then and seemed a little older than Wes looks in the photo.
