The Superior Express -

On a recent Wednesday morning, I parked across the street from the Superior City Park Bandshell, and carried bundles of that week's issue of The Superior Express into the CPI convenience store. I filled the store's newspaper rack, counted the prior week's unsold copies and returned to my vehicle. I recorded the sales in a notebook I keep in my vehicle for that purpose and looked across the street at what had been for nearly 40 years my grandparents home. Before I headed to my delivery point, I walked across the street and took a picture of the house. The house has been painted and undergone other rennovations. I thought my cousins might like to see how the house has changed since they gathered there for Christmas holidays with the Wrench family.

As I continued on my route, I kept thinking about that house and the good memories I made there.

Returning to the newspaper office I began forming those memories into a story. The story grew from a few paragraphs into a multi-page pamphlet. Saturday I printed the pamphlet. Sunday afternoon (Christmas Day) I found the photo album my mother kept when I was a baby.

Looking through the album I spied a picture taken of my parents holding me on Christmas Day, 1946. Mom and Dad were standing outside my grandparents home. I don't remember that day but it would have been my first Christmas with the Wrench family at 609 Bloom Street.

As I continued looking through the album, I recognized my grandparents home and yard was a popular place for pictures of their first grandchild.

Pictures taken at Christmas time reminded me that we always dressed for Christmas. We wore our Sunday finest when going to my grandparents' home for Christmas dinner. In the picture of the 1948 Christmas, Dad was wearing a three-piece suit. My mother probably had on her best dress. I doubt a similar picture with a man in a three-piece suit was replicated anywhere in Superior this year. I saw Christmas pictures posted on social media sites of mothers wearing their best tattered jeans. Pajamas and fleece jogging shorts were also popular attire for Christmas photos this year. I didn't see a single family picture of a man in a three-piece suit.

Several pictures were added to my album on Christmas Day 1948.

While I was the central point in the pictures, I could see my mother's sister sitting in the background holding her first born child. Tracy was but a few days old when the picture was taken. I suspect his parents probably made a similar albums to hold the pictures of their three children.

In three of the snapshots, I am pictured sitting on my new tricycle. That trike and I were to become close companions. I literately rode the wheels off it. In the months and years to come it would make hundreds of trips around the blocks on which both sets of my grandparents homes' were located. Some of the walk sections were badly cracked, A few lots had brick sidewalks. Regardless of the condition of the walks, they were better than anything we had in the country.

When the Blauvelts lived at Sixth and National, I liked to ride off the sidewalk and onto Fifth Street, make a circle and then return to the walk. Suspect I only did that when Grandmother B was not watching. There was no curb along Colorado Street and the paved walk was placed over a tube which allowed the water to run downhill toward Lost Creek. In my imagination, I was riding over the Republican River on a big bridge.

The picture of me riding the new tricycle indicates I must have fared very well that year. Not only did I receive the tricycle, it appears I also received a windup train and some trucks.

Unlike today's toys, not a single toy in 1948 was made of plastic. All were metal. Wish I still had them.

But the years roll on. While I plan to send more copies of the memory pamphlet, only three people are living today who can remember the love and good times shared on Christmas Day in the home of Bill and Grace Wrench. But hopefully, those who have never been inside that home will learn a bit about a place and some of the people who were influential in the formative years of the Wrench cousins.