The self-styled “Big Three” (Donna, Clara, and Kathryn Wright) show up in two photos taken at the Wright residence in Albany, 406 N Geary Street.
The above photo was taken at Christmas 1938. This is Donna (age four), Kathryn (six months) and Clara (just shy of two years).
The family had been able to move into the house on Geary Street just a few months before this. Mom (Florence Wright) recalls:
After we were married, we lived in a basement apartment on Third Street. Miss Hentges was the Hospital Superintendent. When her aunt died, she had the sale of her aunt’s things. There was a house full of furniture which we bought for one-hundred dollars. It was a lot of furniture, too: two beds, two dressers, two stoves, (one a kitchen range), a davenport, two dining tables, a coffee table, chairs, rocking chairs, even garden tools. To have something to put all this furniture in, we rented my grandmother’s rental; a little house next to theirs [130 N Sherman]. (She always called the rent money, “her” money.) We rented that house until we finished building the house at the end of Geary Street in 1938.
I imagine the couch/sofa/davenport the girls are sitting on in the above photo is the one Mom says they bought, along with the other furniture, from the estate of the hospital superintendent’s aunt.
The photo below is a companion to the photo in the very first post on this blog. At the time of that post, Donna said she remembered another similar photo, different than the one in the post. At that point, I had not come across this photo. I don’t know whether this is the photo she was remembering, but maybe.
Like its companion, this photo shows Kathryn, Clara and Donna being held by their grandfather, Arthur McClain. They are outside the front door of the Wright residence on Geary Street. I gave a date of “about 1940” for the companion photo, but both were probably taken a little earlier than that. In both photos Clara seems to be holding what appear to be cards drawn by the children. This is utter speculation, but Donna’s and her grandfather’s birthdays were just a day apart in early October. Possibly these photos were taken at a celebration of those birthdays. If that is at least in the ballpark, the girls’ ages would be 16 months (Kathryn), 2½ (Clara) and 5 (Donna).
All I can say is this “Big Three” doesn’t seem very intimidating. Cute, though. ;–)
Even tho I am in the picture, I will deem it PRECIOUS. Gpa McClain was any grandchild’s ideal. Loving, gentle, interested…so wish he could have lived longer to both enjoy some retirement and also so that his grandchildren could have grown up with him!
I love seeing my dear cousins in their early years! And seeing Grandpa McClain holding them is very special!
I think there is yet one more, with me sitting on Grandpa’s neck, but maybe that was just in my imagination. I think Clara’s girls passed it around to us along with a great heap of photos, telling us to take what we wanted because they didn’t want any of them. I didn’t take the one I’m thinking of (or dreaming of) because I thought I had it in my photo album, but when I looked, it wasn’t there. Precious Grandpa McClain!!!