Dot, far right, is wearing her mother's wedding dress. It was dark brown. White dresses were only for the rich or for Roman Catholic girls. A non-white wedding dress was more practical because it could be worn after the wedding for special occasions and church. Look at the hem of the dress next to Dot's shoes. It is worn ragged from use. Also, since the dresses came almost to the ground, and sometimes all the way, and many streets were unpaved, hemlines took a muddy, dusty beating.

Of course, this dress hadn't been used for years before this photo was taken because Elizabeth had outgrown it. Eight babies will do that to a woman. While you are looking at the dress hem note that Dot has her feet pigeon toed. Like the wink in a previous dress-up photo, it seems a silly antic was Dot's trademark in these photos. In this case it was also a poke at the photographer, who seems to have decided the young women should look very serious. Dot's face is as serious as Agnes Vogel on the extreme left, but she defies the mood with her feet. Dot's running caption: "Oh deah me. Fortune told? Feet. Don't smile, it's too feminine."

This time they're all dressed up pretty as dolls, as emphasized by the doll being held in the front row. This is probably the most significant photo of Dot's life. Dot sent a print to her brother Bert, who showed it to his roommate Ednar Lindberg without telling Ed which "girls" were his sisters. Ed studied the photo, pointed to Dot, and said, "That's the prettiest girl there." Bert told Ed who she was and the next time the men had a holiday Bert took Ed home to meet Dot. The rest is history. Dot was taken with Ed and wrote warmly about him in her diary.

These open fields between 3149 and the canal made life at that time cooler and more pleasant than in the 30's and 40's when Dot, Ed and family lived in the house. At this later time, everything north of the canal was built up with brick buildings only about 6 feet apart, asphalt paved streets, and cement sidewalks. More devastating, the electric and gas companies (Edison) built huge plants on the north bank of the canal a few blocks from 3149. By the time Ed and Dot moved into the house with their children it was stifling in the summer and smelled bad most of the time, from stockyards to the east, the canal to the south (you could see feces and condoms floating along the surface), the belching four smokestacks of the power plant, and effluence from the coke-gas plant. Not much farther to the west was the district dump, with its own brand of odorous gas.

On hot summer nights Ed used to take the family for a ride on Crawford Avenue (now Pulaski, a few blocks east of Karlov) and go across the canal to what was still open fields. It was much, much cooler. Everyone hated returning home to the heat. After WWII that whole area south of the canal was filled with more industry and tract homes. A two-story housing project began to deteriorate almost as soon as it was occupied. The whole area around 3149 in all directions is now a deteriorating slum that is entered at your own risk.

3149 and environs was a good place to live when Dot grew up there. When her children grew up there, the city block on Karlov remained a good neighborhood. Many people had lived on the block for years, one family since Dot's family had first moved into the new 3149 house. Their granddaughter, Betty Jane Purcell, was Larue's best friend. All the the children on that block grew up together like cousins, played together, and watched each other marry. WWII caused most of them to scatter around the country, but they still kept in touch, as Dot and friends did. Dot and all her generation are now dead, and Larue's generation are dying. The 3149 environment is no longer, but the memories are still alive and well in these albums put together by Dot and maintained by her children.