Landmark Birthday.

I've posted this photo before and today I'm doing it again for a special reason. The young lady on the back of the motorcycle would, 16 years later, become my mother.


Today Mom is 102 years old.


Thanks to Ludwig II and Beachcomber I found out the bike is an A.J.S. The photo was taken in 1927 and according to Mom when I asked her this morning the bike was about 3 years old at the time.
The photo was taken in a small village just outside Birmingham, England.

My uncle Doug is the young man on the bike with her.


http://s866.photobucket.com/user/speedydick/media/granddads motorcycle/Grandma2.jpg.html?sort=3&o=1

To put into a proper context as to how old 102 is, Mom was 3 months and 3 weeks old when the Titanic sank.

Mom was an accomplished ballerina and a year after the photo was taken she was asked to dance with the London Ballet but the family was moving to Canada and her parent were not about to leave their 17 year old daughter behind in London.

My uncle was a WW2 fighter pilot and then later in the war he was tapped to fly over the Atlantic hunting submarines in flying boats. He said they managed to scare a few of them.
After the war he became a veterinary scientist who's specialty was chickens and he went on to develop 5 different tests that help identify diseases in chicken that are used worlds wide. He spent most of his career in Florida working for the state in a lab and for you Florida fellas he used to call Jacksonville "Up north. He was in Miami.

And speaking of the Titanic their father was in charge of making and installing the lighting in the ship for the Warnworth Electric company of Birmingham,England.

Steve.

GearNut'

She often talks about what she's seen such as the the first talking movies and how cars have improved over the years and what medical improvements that we take for granted today and diseases that took her friends lives when she was younger but the real history nut was her mother. When Grandma was bed ridden with cancer we had long talks about what she had seen over the years.
As she said so many inventions had happened in her lifetime from steam ships to steam trains evolving into modern diesel engines, the invention of flight, radio, television and electric lights, movies, telephones, cameras and all the old ways that disappeared in Moms lifetime and a little bit in mine. Grandma said it was something to have seen early aircraft to them putting a man in space happen in her lifetime.

She talked about Queen Victoria's death and funeral procession in great length.

When Mom was eleven they went on a summer holiday to the sea side and they watched a four masted ship coming into port. She said the sails were going up and down as the ship tacked into port and it glided up to the dock as the hawsers were thrown over to the men waiting to snub the ship to the dock. Grandma told her never to forget what she saw because she would never see it again and she didn't. The ship was bringing wheat from Australia and then was taking a load back and after that trip it was to be broken up for scrap. She told me about this a month ago.

As she said I would see improvements that she couldn't imagine like the cell phone and computers but the chance of me living to see much new invented was very slim.

Steve.

I'll print this thread out tomorrow and give it to her so she can see what everyone has written.

Steve.