Steve's Birthday

Steve and elephants_1950

Steve_Halloween_1950

Steve, Sally and Susan Halloween 1951

Steve's birthday with Mom. You can see a bottle of milk, still coming in glass bottles.

To celebrate Steve's hallmark birthday, I'm posting a few pictures from his early years. We know that he survived, but his parents have let him get very close to some slumbering elephants.

Happy Birthday, Steve!

Our Tall Ancestor

The unknowns, but to me the woman on the right looks like Ada Fraser below.

Jimmy, Ada, Miller and Hugh Fraser - Carmel CA, Labor Day, 1927.

As everyone knows, the Internet can be distracting. Earlier this week I was working on identifying people from Gussie's notebooks. These were pictures from 1907 that for some reason were unidentified.  Looking at one I thought it looked like the Frasers. Betsy Sharpe Walker's sister Roseanna married Hugh Fraser and some time during the first decade of the 1900s moved to California.



It would be more definite to me, if both pictures had three men instead of one having two and one three. But back to my Internet distraction. Searching through Ancestry.com, I found that the 1940 census record identified Ada's daughter Kaetherine, as an artist who worked as a cartoonist in California. (One record indicated that she had sailed from Yokohama Japan and sailed into Liverpool, September 1939. For another aside Liverpool was the port her mother Roseanna and the other Sharpes had departed 70 years earlier. She returned to America via New York in October 1939.) I thought maybe her Kaetherine's daughter might be alive, but that came up empty. Then I realized that maybe Kaetherine had had an artistic career that might be of note. I googled Kaetherine Sumner Einfeldt and up came Kae Sumner Einfeldt with her own page in Wikipedia.

Her claim to fame is she formed the first modern tall club, The California Tip Toppers Club. It eventually grew into a world wide organization. You can read the rest by following this link, but it goes on to say she worked on the Disney's Snow White, painting the dwarfs.  Kae Sumner Einfeldt Wikipedia.

This second link expands on women like Kae who worked for Walt Disney on his cartoons in the 1930s and 1940s.
Vanity Fair article describing the work of the painters at Disney

So drink a toast to our second cousin, once removed. Cheers, Kae! I'll watch the dwarfs in Snow White with more interest now.

EA's Sinclair Station in 1936

EA at the Sinclair Station, 10th & College Blvd.

 In 1936 one of the Topeka newspapers highlighted EA's 16 years as owner of the Burkhardt Battery and Electric Company.

It will be a big week this week at the Burkhardt Battery and Electric Co., 118 W Fourth. E. A. Burkhardt, owner, is celebrating the sixteenth anniversary of the establishment of his business in Topeka and is also opening a new Sinclair Super Service station at Tenth and College avenues. The station which will be fully equipped to handle all kinds of service, will be formerly opened the latter part of the week.

After Burkhardt had finished his work at Washburn college where he captained the football team in 1911, he started to work in the electrical department of the Santa Fe Railway. Later he became foreman of the Keele Electric Co where he became interested in forming a business of his own. After operating a Willard Battery Service Station in Osage City for two months, he returned to Topeka and opened his local store at the present location, 118 W Fourth street. From that time on his business registered a steady growth and his personnel increased from one employee until he now has a staff of 11.
So successful was he in retailing Willard batteries that he was given a district distributorship so that he could handle, thru other dealers, the entire Topeka trade territory of 16 counties. Since he distributes for 235 Willard Storage Battery dealers, he now has to buy batteries by the carload, a thousand at a time. This firm also is distributor for the following nationally-known merchandise: Delco-Remy automotive parts, Mohawk tires and Grizzly Brake linings.

The new Burkhardt’s Sinclair Service station will feature . . . . washing, cleaning and polish service for car owners. Cecil Haug will be manager of the station; O B Thomas is the retail sales manager of the Electric Shop; and Burkhardt spends most of his time doing promotional work in his distributing territory. 

Happy Birthday Helen and Mary Grace

Helen taking care of Mary Grace in 1923.

Helen helping Mary balance on the car.

As a toast to Mary Grace and Helen on their birthdays are a couple of pictures of them in the early years. Mary Grace's birthday was September 26 and Helen's a mere 10 days later on October 6th. 

Mary, Helen, Allan & Ethel on a trip to Colorado in 1931.

Ethel, Helen and Mary in Topeka in 1942.