Family Throwback Photo

Back row: Theodora Preston (Lala’s youngest sister) never married, Elizabeth Preston Bryant (Lala), Herbert Sydney Bryant (Bert), Katherine Gertrude Bryant Kingsbury (Kitty), & Herbert Preston Bryant (Herb), Kitty’s younger brother by five years (served in the Army in WWII).
Front row: Preston Deane Kingsbury and Bryant Kingsbury with an unknown pet

This house will be one of the stops on our Washington DC road trip this summer. It is either the house on Drummond Avenue in Chevy Chase that Joe, Kitty and the boys lived in for several years or the home of Kitty’s parents, Lala and Bert Bryant in the area now known as Manor Park – 304 Rittenhouse Street. Bert and Lala moved to that house when it was first built in 1919 and lived there until some time after Bert’s death in 1950. Shortly after that, Lala moved to New Brunswick, New Jersey where Herbert, her son was living and working on a newspaper.

For almost all of 1944, Kitty lived alone with the boys because Papa Joe was on assignment in Iran as Assistant to the Personnel Director of the US Financial Mission to Iran. My uncle Deane (younger than Bryant, my father by four years) has a great story about the FBI coming to the house to investigate reports of someone making a bomb. It was related to something my father was working on in the basement (probably not a bomb but knowing my father’s curiosity and scientific bent it might have been a bomb or maybe fireworks – it was definitely something explosive!)

Need Deane to fill in this story and others with more detail this summer.

Celebrating my Father’s Birthday

I’ve gotten so far behind on posts on my personal blog that I posted about my father’s birthday there but here’s a link for you to read about it.

Interesting tidbit about my father’s name. He has no middle name even though he spent most of his life using the initials BBK. Growing up, everyone in my family called him K.B. – not sure why except that those were his “Navy initials” last name first.  On his birth certificate his name is Bryant Kingsbury. The middle name he often used, Bush, was his father’s middle name. So now for the interesting tidbit.

According to my father, who apparently knew that he did not have a middle name even though he used one, the reason he began using Bush as his middle name is because when he was born, a friend of the family dedicated a book to him and she used the name – Bryant Bush Kingsbury.

“And that’s how I got Bush as a middle name.”

When my father was born, his parents were good friends with another professor at St Johns College and his wife. The professor’s name was Ford Brown and his wife was Zenith Brown who had some success as a mystery writer using the pen name Leslie Ford. One of her novels, Murder in Maryland, was dedicated to my father.

 

Leslie Ford was born Zenith Jones (nee Brown) in 1889 in Smith River, Calif., where her father was a missionary among the Indians, and spent her earliest years in a papoose, raised among the Indians to whom her father ministered. She studied to be a journalist and started freelancing in 1928. She wrote her first novel, Footsteps on the Stairs in 1931 and her last, Trial for Ambush, in 1962. In-between, she wrote more than 60 mysteries, created two major crime series (as Leslie Ford and David Frome), and was a foreign correspondent in the European and Pacific Theaters.

from: http://bookscribbles.blogspot.com/2012/07/leslie-fords-fall-from-grace.html

Thanks to my very thoughtful husband, I have one of Leslie Ford’s books. When he heard the story I just recounted (from my father, I had never heard it before) he ordered the book on line. Maybe I’ll even read it one day!

Baby Bryant – 1932

My erratic posting schedule belies my scattered train of thought. I want to be more disciplined but at 60 I don’t think that’s likely to happen. I could fool myself and think – “if only I weren’t working full-time, I’d have more time for  . . . ”

I have always had too many things that I want to do. Consequently, manythings don’t get done. Rather than struggle against the stigma of lack of discipline to be overcome, I think I need to embrace it. You get what you get when you get it – I do what I want when I want to. Ahhh… liberating.

Is it a Kingsbury trait – or just me? I look at pictures of Joseph B. Kingsbury and read his wonderfully written contributions to the family letter and review the many things he accomplished, and I doubt my lack of focus comes from him. (But perhaps his influence has something to do with the many interests and activities I pursue.) Maybe from Kitty Bryant – his younger and more impetuous wife? Who knows – it doesn’t really matter.

I need to be working on taxes but the H&R Block page won’t load so I might as well take a minute (or 60) to share some of these adorable photos of my father as an infant. The dates are noted in JBK’s neat handwriting on the back or in the margin. The first two are from August 21, 1932, which would make my father just 9 days shy of 3  months. The one with Kitty, on the far right, is dated July 30, 1932, which makes him exactly two months old.

 

I have a copy of my father’s birth certificate so I know he was born in Bethesda, Maryland. I’m guessing Kitty was at home with her parents in Washington DC as the time for his birth approached because Joe and Kitty never lived in Bethesda. From his federal job application, I know that JBK was teaching government at St. Johns College in Annapolis Maryland from  September 1928 to June 1936. During his summers, JBK often worked for E.O. Griffenhagen & Associates, a Chicago consulting firm that did accounting and personnel studies. He was working for them when he and Kitty got married in January 1928 and their married life began in Columbus, Ohio.

From his letters to Kitty before they were married, I know that his job consisted of interviewing various state agencies and compiling salary surveys and personnel reports in an effort to equalize pay grades within state government. This work took him to such exotic places as Boston, MA, Hartford CT, Columbus, OH, Richmond, VA, Sacramento, CA and East Lansing, MI.  He must have been in Hartford the summer after Bryant was born because this photo is labelled “Hartford 1932.”

I’ll end this post with one last photo of baby Bryant and his mother Kitty, which I believe was taken at 304 Rittenhouse Street, NW, Washington DC – the home of Kitty’s parents, Herbert and Elizabeth Bryant in August 1932. Stay tuned next time (no telling when that might be) for some even more adorable baby photos of my father.