Experiencing the World Through the Eyes of Your Dad, the Teenager

The kid you see here is my dad, Lionel Haywood. In this photo he was fifteen, maybe sixteen. This one was taken some time during the late 1940s, and oh, by the way, he bought that sweater with money he earned working in the bulb fields. It makes me wish there was a color version of this picture just to see what kind of RBG values are going on with that pullover.

Dad was born in Aberdeen, Washington in the waning days of spring, 1933. His parents had welcomed his sister and only sibling, Lila, nine years earlier, and he entered the scene a true baby of the Great Depression. Dad's early years were marked with upheaval and transition, his parents planting shallow stakes anywhere electrician work was available. To say things were tough would be a significant understatement, and while Dad claims he never went hungry, imagine hearing as a six-year-old that tonight you have two choices for dinner: rutabagas or nothing.

As the Thirties came to an end, America's burgeoning war effort provided its workers with plentiful economic opportunities and the family settled in Sumner, a picturesque community nestled in the lush Puyallup Valley—think soda fountains, matinees, Floyd the barber—you know the place. 

Dad's parents created a comfortable yet hard-working existence in Sumner, purchasing this house on Zehnder Street. 

His first job was thinning out carrot patches in the nearby fields. He was eight. Seems a little on the young side, even for the 1940s, but I just realized I had not one, but two jobs at age eight: 1) watching as much TV as possible and 2) asking one question too many. 

Sometime along the way, Dad managed to get his hands on a Kodak Baby Brownie Special...

...and his lifelong passion for photography was kindled. He estimates that the photos you're seeing here were taken between 1945 and 1948, all with his Baby Brownie, and a few of them developed in his makeshift home darkroom. 

To a lot of us, a house isn't a home until it's filled with the clickety-clackety cadence of a four-legged creature. Enter Bingo, a caffeinated mixture of Spitz and Pomeranian, and my dad's first creative muse:

Bingo was a free spirit, a bohemian if you will. His favorite pastime was to magically appear, smiling and wagging his tail, at unexpected locations. It might be outside the school or in the post office parking lot, but wherever it was, he'd appear convinced that you were elated to have run into him. Get out the special coffee cake, honey, we've got company. Bingo's here!

Due to the dog's outgoing sensibilities, the town police chief, a man named Nort Winn, had grown to know Bingo on a first-name basis (Okay, I understand that all Bingo had was a first name, but you get what I mean.). Despite my dad's best efforts to keep Bingo tied up in the yard, the mutt would invariably escape, popping up to taunt Chief Winn in parts of Sumner both near and far. He'd engage the cranky cop in his own version of whack-a-mole until Nort would grow tired of the chase and drive off, vanquished again by this lovable scoundrel.

All the while, Dad continued to explore the world with his camera. His other subjects were typically family members like Grandpa Purl:

Dad said that in this shot, Grandpa Purl was messing around with a cousin. I don't know, though, it kind of looks like a post-Sunday-supper exorcism. I'm thinking this little exercise might've taken place somewhere between the after-dinner Lucky Strike and double scoop of Neapolitan ice cream, hold the strawberry. 

I'll just remind you that these photos were snapped by an adolescent male. Hence, this ill-advised shot Dad took of his mom working in the kitchen.

He might happen upon Uncle Jack preening from the business end of a dairy cow:

Or compose the scene of a just-completed model airplane poised for takeoff from the picnic table:

Overwhelmingly, though, my dad's focus returned to his best buddy, Bingo. Here again is the pooch, mugging with the omnipresent Grandpa Purl:

Bingo was like that guy who's up for a good time 24/7. Because of this, Dad thought it might be a good idea to bring him along for an overnight trip to Scout Island on Lake Tapps. Since the scouts were a high-energy lot, it seemed as good a pairing as Chips Ahoy and V8 juice. I mean, come on, don't these guys look like they'd love to have a canine mascot to frolic with?

And things did go well—the first day, anyway. But the following morning, a dark shadow of contempt would soon envelope Dad's trusty companion. As the boys rolled up their sleeping bags and prepared for breakfast, one of the scouts uttered a simple, three-word query that would change everything: 

"Where's the bacon?"

Bingo continued to live a full life, quickly regaining his self-esteem, and putting the bacon affair behind him for good. Alas, in the end, he died with the same gusto that he'd lived, meeting his demise as a result of his need to ambush moving semi-trucks. Mercifully, Dad was at school at the time, and a kind next-door neighbor named Bill Moon witnessed the accident and buried Bingo in his yard before my dad came home. 

I'll end our show there. Dad took a lot more pictures with that Baby Brownie Special, followed by tens of thousands of photographs, slides, videos and eight-millimeter home movies. He's captured our holidays, birthdays, soccer games, band concerts—even my graduation from Art Institute of Seattle for God's sake, a one-year program I took in the evenings.

Here's he is with his great-granddaughter, Charlotte. 

I'm so grateful for his diligence in documenting so much of our family's lives. On top of that, to see how a teenager from 75 years ago views his world through a camera lens is another incredible gift, especially when that kid is your dad.