Mom & Ernie

Edna on the left & Morna Collins.

 Mom had many stories about growing up and she wrote them all down in her collection, My Life. But one I've always remembered was about Ernie falling out of the car and no one noticing. Even back in the fifties and sixties when the only thing holding you in the car was a door, it was hard to visualize. As time has passed and children are now carefully ensconced in car seats, it's unfathomable.

I'm not challenging the veracity of the story, I'm just illustrating it with these pictures. The following is Mom's description: 

As I was growing up my parents were good friends of the minister and his family.  Their name was Collins. . . My mother liked his wife very much and they did things together a lot.  They had four children like my parents. 

The Collins-Burkhardt families--Mary on the right and Ernie the left.

The youngest one was named Ernie and we were not in school so we would be with the two women.  One day my mother was driving down the river road that ran beside the Kaw River on a dirt road going to my Uncle Percy’s cabin.  The door flew open and Ernie fell out.  They didn’t notice and it took awhile before I get their attention that Ernie was no longer in the car.  I did not push him.  I liked Ernie.  

Collins' Summer home on Crystal Lake, MI- 1928

The Kaw River from Percy's Camp in 1927.

The Collins & Burkhardt children. Mary & Ernie are the little ones in front.

Burkhardts and Collins' on the shores of Crystal Lake-1928.

 Her description continues:
We spent one summer vacation with them on Crystal Lake in Michigan.  At that time Women sometimes wore knickers while on vacation.  Evidently my mother didn’t like the way the pictures came out as she cut the bottom off all the pictures that she was in. The Collins owned a cabin on the lake.  Everything was very sandy.

One other detail she has in her memoir is that Edna allowed Dr. Collins to keep his beer in their refrigerator, because he couldn't in his at home. One has to remember that the twenties were a time of Prohibition so it would have been highly improper for a man of the cloth to have illegal substances in his home.

I've heard these stories multiple times, but it's nice to see the people involved.