A Trip Down Memory Lane

A couple of weeks ago my email got hacked. Fortunately it was over the weekend so I was able to spend much of the following day cleaning up emails. I must have deleted 4,000 ancient emails. Not sure why I had so many other than hotmail gives me a boatload of space and I never use most of it, so I just got lazy.  

I also had not cleaned out old emails from my sister and brother. I knew there were a few I wanted to keep, since they're gone and I won't be getting any more emails from them. My sister wrote rarely. My brother was a prolific writer. He was also the keeper of our family history. I was delighted when he began publishing pictures of us, our parents and our grandparents either in emails or on his blog. I miss his stories as much as I miss him.

When I was cleaning up emails I came across some pictures of our grandfather (Pop) in Surinam. Pop had a degree from Moo U (aka NC State) in agriculture. He worked as a local extension agent in Raleigh and eventually worked his way up to the big show in Washington, DC working for the Agriculture Dept. As a part of that job he was selected as one of a group of men who would go to South America and teach the locals down there how to better farm their land. No doubt they took DDT and all kinds of other stuff which is now banned, but was state-of-the-art back then. All this went on in the late 1950's and early 1960's. In fact my grandparents lived in Surinam during the first two years of my life - 1954 - 1956. Later, although Pop retired in 1960, he was still asked to go on some of these junkets to South America as a consultant. I can remember my grandmother bemoaning having to find him a winter coat in July since he was going south of the equator and the country he was going to was in the middle of winter.



Pop always came back with a bunch of slides he would show for us and some neighbors who were good friends of theirs. These pictures were a tad racy as some of those Surinam ladies went nekkid from the waist up. That was shocking back in the early 60's. So, join me for a trip down memory lane as I share some of Pop's exotic adventures.