I hated my costume

I started a flurry of comments yesterday when I posted this photo on my Facebook wall.

My recollection of the date and occasion were fuzzy but Tina Tyner (fourth girl from the right) says it was a May Day festival during our first-grade year, which would be 1952. I’m the fourth boy from the right. My mother shot the photo with her little Kodak double-lens reflex camera at Riley Park in Delphi, Ind. Several of us would spend the rest of our elementary, junior high and high school years together in the same school building. About all I remember about the day was that I hated the nasty green crepe paper getup and was greatly relieved when I could take it off.

The kids in the photo (this is subject to revision as more people see it) are: Girls (from left)’ Diana Trapp, Nancy Jackson, Beth Andrews, Alexis Smith, unknown, Tina Wray, Susan Kent, Connie Downing, and another unidentified. Boys, Jack Klepinger, Lonnie Miller, Bill Sieber, John Trent, Jim Goyer, me, David McCain, Floyd Ryder (?), and Tommy Anderson.

Seeing as how it was 1952 during a period when Americans were especially concerned about Communism, it seems odd that we’d have festivities on a day traditionally celebrated as a worker’s holiday by Communists and Socialists. But then May Day as a spring festival predates all of that political stuff, so that must have been the driving concern.

I did a hasty job of colorizing the original black and white image to give a sense of how we looked.