My attempt to share stories for each letter of the alphabet featuring our life in Austin B.C. (Before Children) 1975-1985. The 70s were a long time ago. 26 stories might be a stretch for my brain, but I have made it to P – as has the Sepia Saturday prompt photo for this week. (Okay, okay – I skipped O!)

The first time I participated in Sepia Saturday was June 30, 2012 with a post I titled Making Movies. I featured photographs that my husband and his friend took while watching the filming of The Sugarland Express. In that post, you can view photos of Goldie Hawn, Ben Johnson, and Steven Spielberg. My husband’s friend wanted to direct movies. He didn’t fulfill his youthful dream of directing feature films, but he worked in the industry for many years. My husband enjoyed both photography and watching movies, and the influence of his good friend led him to occasionally combine the two interests when something was being filmed nearby.

Murder at the World Series, released March 20, 1977

My husband took the photo below at the Houston Astrodome. Clearly a photo of the crew rather than the stars. His friend is the blonde haired young man in the middle. Looks like he is talking to someone. On the IMBd website, our friend is listed as Production Assistant (uncredited).

On the set of “Murder at the World Series”

I found two more photos of our friend online related to this movie, but I can’t download them. He is on the far right, scratching his head here. And he is in the picture header of a blog post here (second from left). Not a movie star, but it was fun to see him in photos at work as part of the crew and filling the stands with extras.

The ABC movie wasn’t exactly fine art, but it was a job in the business for our twenty-something friend.

The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, released July 8, 1977

Once again, our friend is listed as Production Assistant (uncredited), but this time he worked on a movie movie. My husband and his friend grew up in Houston, so we must have combined a family visit with a visit to the movie set. Some of the movie was filmed at the Astrodome, but the day my husband took this photo, the location was in a park in Houston.

The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training. William Devane

The movie star in the photo above is William Devane. I can’t tell who the child stars are.

Several Houston Astros – including Bob Watson, Cesar Cedeno, Enos Cabell, J.R. Richard and Ken Forsch – made cameos near the end of the movie, but Watson was the only one given a line to speak. According to an article in the Houston Chronicle, Watson said he learned one thing about making movies. “What I really remember about that is, I didn’t want to be a movie star, because, even if you get the lines right and the scene is right, you have to do it 15 times. There was a lot of standing around.”

I learned that lesson too. Maybe that is why I didn’t tag along for some of my husband’s photo sessions.

Outlaw Blues

Our friend didn’t have a connection to this movie. Quite a bit of the movie was filmed in Austin, so my husband went to watch and take some photos on a day when he was free. The movie starred Peter Fonda and Susan Saint James.

Outlaw Blues. Susan Saint James and Peter Fonda

When Susan Saint James was doing talk shows to promote the film, she said something to the effect that Austin was a sleepy little college town, which some found disparaging.

Outlaw Blues, Austin, TX

Outlaw Blues, Austin TX

I searched the names of the cinematographer, director, and assistant director hoping to identify the men (other than Peter Fonda) in the photos above. I didn’t have any luck making a match to faces half hidden. To make it more difficult, it seems the people behind the scenes don’t show up in many online images.

Outlaw Blues, east 6th St., Austin TX

Peter Fonda made his singing debut in Outlaw Blues. I believe that the singer Steve Fromholz is in the scene just before Peter Fonda begins to sing. The actor singing. The singer acting.

A few more scenes of Austin are in this 30 second trailer.

Dallas

Our friend also worked on the television series Dallas. IBMd shows that he worked as Production Assistant for three episodes in 1978 and as 2nd Assistant Director for 23 episodes in 1980-1981. My husband and I drove up to Dallas to see our friend at work. I can place the year, because the heat is seared in my memory.

In Dallas/Fort Worth, high temperatures exceeded 100 °F a total of 69 times, including a record 42 consecutive days from June 23 to August 3, of which 28 days were above 105, and five days above 110. The temperature hit 113 °F on two consecutive days (June 26 and 27). I thought about buying one of these t-shirts, but I didn’t want to go looking for one. It was too hot.

The day we were there, they were shooting in the club of a hotel. We don’t remember which one. It was kind of dark and crowded, so we couldn’t see much of the action. We did however, get the opportunity for my husband to get this photo during a break.

Larry Hagman during filming of Dallas, 1980

Looks like Larry is resting against a fan, doesn’t it? In his shirt pocket are some bills he had printed up in lieu of autographs. I remember seeing one up close, so I assume he pulled one out to give us, but we don’t remember actually having one.

One thing our friend gave us that he probably shouldn’t have was a copy of a script. We used to know its location, but now we are both wondering where we put it. I remember it has a light blue cover, so I’ll be on the look out.

That’s a wrap! But don’t go before visiting Sepia Saturday, where you can view more cinematic responses to the prompt photo.

Sepia Saturday provides bloggers with an opportunity to share their history through the medium of photographs. Historical photographs of any age or kind become the launchpad for explorations of family history, local history and social history in fact or fiction, poetry or prose, words or further images. If you want to play along, sign up to the link, try to visit as many of the other participants as possible, and have fun.

My attempt to share stories for each letter of the alphabet featuring our life in Austin B.C. (Before Children) 1975-1985. The 70s were a long time ago. 26 stories might be a stretch for my brain, but I have made it to N – as has the Sepia Saturday prompt photo for this week.

I am a week late posting a response to the letter N. Once I started writing, this post got longer and longer, with many stories to tell. In the end, I decided that maybe this was not the right time or perhaps the right place to tell those stories. So a short version follows.

After I earned my MSSW in 1978, my husband and I traded places. I took his job as the vocational trainer at a halfway house for adults with developmental disabilities and he entered graduate school.

The halfway house was in an apartment complex in south Austin. The program grew during the seven years I worked there. First added were two more apartment buildings accredited as an ICF-MR (Intermediate Care Facility – Mental Retardation). Federal guidelines required a Social Worker on staff, so I moved into that position. We later added a fourth apartment complex, which served as a quarter-way house. I was the Assistant Administrator for the four-complex campus as well as the Social Worker. We served a total of 56 clients who had been diagnosed with a developmental disability. Terminology has changed over time, but most of our residents were diagnosed with mental retardation, cerebral palsy, or epilepsy – and often with multiple diagnoses.

Our goal was to help the residents attain as much independence as possible. For some, the setting was long-term, for others, it was transitional. Independent living skills and work skills were both emphasized.

Learning to cook

When it was still just the halfway house, the staff shared an office. Several of our clients worked at Goodwill Industries. Some were in training. Some worked in the sheltered workshop. They rode the bus together each day to and from work.

Former Goodwill Industries building

Mary Sue, a middle-aged woman who had been with us a few weeks, was scheduled to begin her first day at Goodwill. We did some bus training with her and we weren’t too concerned about her getting there and back because she could just stay with the group. We told the other clients to stick with her. Make sure she got off with them at Goodwill. Make sure she got on the bus with them to come home. Make sure she got off with them at the bus stop for the short walk home. Promises were made. She was to stay with them. They were to stay with her.

When the clients arrived home late afternoon, the energetic and talkative young man in the group, walked into the office and announced, “I have good news and bad news! The good news is … (some good thing that happened to him at Goodwill that day). “What is the bad news?” we asked. “Oh. Mary Sue didn’t get off the bus with us.”

My co-worker Judy and I grabbed a bus schedule and the keys to the van. She drove and I navigated. We hoped we could catch up with the bus at one of the stops, get on, and find her. No such luck. We drove the bus route, searching for her. Retracing the route, we were about to give up when we spotted her sitting on the front stoop of a house on a tiny cul-de-sac. Whew!

And that’s how it was working there. The “news” was mostly good, but sometimes you needed to grab a partner, if one was available, and deal with whatever unexpected event happened. On a few rare occasions, the news was really bad. I learned a lot about human nature and our commonalities, the difficulties faced by people with “differences”, and my own strengths and weaknesses. I learned to listen carefully, to choose my words intentionally, to break tasks down into as many steps as were needed. I practiced patience. I learned to make accommodations. I knew people whose lives were a cautionary tale – like the woman with a severe speech impairment and an IQ measured in the 40s due to a fall from a grocery cart as a toddler. And I knew people who gave me inspiration – see I Was Once a Jogger. Humor was always our friend.

My last day of employment arrived a little earlier than expected. I was getting ready for work the week of Thanksgiving 1985 when I went into labor with our first child. She was a couple of weeks early.

I took three months of maternity leave and when it was nearly over, I met with my boss and asked for an additional three months. I wanted my baby to be a less tiny and fragile thing before leaving her in the care of someone else. She said no.

Although we rotated on-call duty, as the Assistant Administrator, I was always next in line if the staff couldn’t reach my boss. I felt like I didn’t have the emotional capacity to be mother to this new baby and also responsible 24-7 for 56 adults who get lost, lose jobs, have accidents, have roommate problems, have emotional breakdowns, get sick … My responsibility did not end at the end of the work day, but it felt as constant as a parent’s. Just in case, my husband and I had practiced living off one salary while I was on maternity leave and found that it was doable – there were things we simply did not need to spend money on. So that was that.

I was disappointed that my boss turned me down because I did like my job and loved the people I worked with. I don’t know what would have happened if she had granted me the additional three months. Perhaps she sensed that it would have just delayed the inevitable.

Please visit other Sepia Saturday participants here. I can’t wait to see what others have prepared in response to this funny prompt photo!

Sepia Saturday 579 Theme Image (17 July 2021) 2106420

Sepia Saturday provides bloggers with an opportunity to share their history through the medium of photographs. Historical photographs of any age or kind become the launchpad for explorations of family history, local history and social history in fact or fiction, poetry or prose, words or further images. If you want to play along, sign up to the link, try to visit as many of the other participants as possible, and have fun.

My attempt to share stories for each letter of the alphabet featuring our life in Austin B.C. (Before Children) 1975-1985. The 70s were a long time ago. 26 stories might be a stretch for my brain, but I have made it to M – as has the Sepia Saturday prompt photo for this week.

My husband and I enjoyed several hobbies during those years. Some we did together and some we did separately. One of the hobbies we enjoyed doing together was ceramics – the kind of ceramics that entails going to a shop to purchase molded greenware to paint and glaze. My grandmother Hockensmith enjoyed doing ceramics and took me with her when I spent time with them during summer vacation. I even earned the Girl Scout ceramics badge one summer. After my husband and I moved to Austin, we found a ceramics shop and decided to give it a try.

We frequented a small shop tucked away in an alley off west 12th Street. I drove by a few weeks ago to see if the building still exists. It does, and is now the office of a design firm. We would walk through this entryway and turn left to enter the shop.

The walls of this kind of ceramics shop were usually lined with shelves filled with greenware and a few pieces of bisque ware; a section for paints, glazes, and supplies; and tables where customers could sit and work.

It could be a social activity or you could take your purchases home to work on them. We did both. It was sometimes fun to sit in a room and talk to the owner, who might show you something new he was working on or just got in, see what others were making, enjoy some conversation, and get advice. Everything you needed was right there.

Greenware is the state the clay item is in when it is removed from a mold. It is dry, but fragile, and won’t be completely dry until it is fired. The first step is to prepare the greenware by smoothing off the seam lines created by the mold. At this stage, you could also add color and details with underglaze or even carve (gently) into the greenware or add texture. When finished, you carved your initials or name onto the bottom of the piece so the owner would know who the piece belonged to when it was removed from the kiln. The cost for each firing was half the price of the greenware. For some of us, there is something very satisfying about cleaning up greenware.

I don’t expect you to watch the video below. I included it in case you are super interested, but mostly because I appreciated the teacher who, like the rest of us, makes mistakes. She dribbles glaze and makes it a happy accident and in a later video about glazing spills glaze and gets her fingerprints where she doesn’t want them. It is just real life and, of course, she is trying to do things at an odd angle in front of her recording phone.

After firing, the bisque piece is ready to be glazed. Underglazes and glazes both take three coats, but dry fairly quickly. Red was the most difficult color to work with. If you didn’t really cover with three full coats of red, you might have gray in places. You can also dry brush or stain the bisque piece instead of glazing. It was fun to try different techniques and glazes.

I am realizing that we made quite a few pieces over the course of several years. I know what we still have and what shows up in photographs, but there were also things I have forgotten that we gave as gifts to family. The recipients were always kind and appreciative, although looking back …. maybe they were grimacing on the inside.

We often matched a person’s interests to our choice of gift. For example, my husband’s brother had a pet raccoon, so when my husband saw this pot he made it for him.

We gave both of our mothers these swan soup terrines. We also made them cookie jars that looked like Victorian style houses.

We made quite a few Christmas decorations that we still use.
 

Grandmother Hockensmith made my parents a Christmas tree that I just loved as a kid, so I made one for us. We also made a Christmas snow house. I think we made the houses for our parents too. I use them to set up little Christmas scenes on a baker’s rack, along with some other small ceramic ornaments we made.

We did this nativity scene that we painted as bisque. My husband did some; I did some.

I think I enjoy the holiday items the most. Other things go out of style, but a kitschy holiday is always okay with me!  My dad (Jim) used to hunt pheasant and quail, so we did some birds for him. Some are okay?? You can see part of a Canadian goose in the background behind my niece and daughter. And right beside it is an ashtray decoration Grandma Hockensmith made for him even though he didn’t smoke (lots of decorative ceramic items in the 60s were ash trays). It has little pheasants or quail on it.
We still have the unicorn that sits in the background of this photo of my cousin and me, but it is not on display now.

Notice the hummingbird on the right side of the mantle. There was another ceramic shop a longer drive from us where we sometimes shopped. The owner carried some porcelain as well as clay greenware. My husband decided to give it a try. I think his hummingbird turned out well for a first and only attempt. Unfortunately, the very end of its beak is chipped off.

Sometime in the late 1970s, we started seeing a lot of ceramic wind chimes for sale in gift stores. And a big variety of cute cookie cutters. We had one of those, “We could do that” moments. We asked the owner of the ceramic shop about getting clay and worked out a price for firing. The clay would fire into a color close to burnt orange, the school color of the University of Texas. We bought some cookie cutters: the state of Texas, an armadillo, UT, and the UT longhorn.

A big round cookie cutter worked for the piece the chimes hung from and we found that the center of a doughnut cutter worked to make the smaller holes in the top piece. We used an ice pick to make the tiny holes to thread fishing line through the tops of the chimes. This was in the time before glue guns, so we used some other kind of glue to secure the knots in the fishing line.

We worked at our kitchen table, making clay “cookies.” The UT didn’t work at all. The armadillo didn’t work very well. The longhorn and Texas worked best. It took some time to perfect our process and how to best balance the wind chimes, but once we had a few good ones, we went down to the Drag to see if we could get any of the stores interested in selling them.

Neither of us can remember what store agreed to take some on consignment. Then we got lucky when the University Co-op bought some from us outright. We took more back to the stores when they sold the ones we left with them. Our wind chimes were even advertised in The Daily Texan before Christmas in 1979.

We got tired of the wind chime business, or maybe it ran its course. We continued to do ceramics for a while, but work and then kids … and no more ceramics.

I watched the videos above and some others and it reminded me of how we both enjoyed that creative outlet and made me wonder if I would like to do it again. There aren’t many ceramic shops like these any more. Locally, there are a few places where you can paint bisque (no greenware available) and they seem to specialize in parties. It is not the same atmosphere at all and pricier than what was available back in the day.

Maybe our relatives are breathing a sigh of relief.

Sepia Saturday provides bloggers with an opportunity to share their history through the medium of photographs. Historical photographs of any age or kind become the launchpad for explorations of family history, local history and social history in fact or fiction, poetry or prose, words or further images. If you want to play along, sign up to the link, try to visit as many of the other participants as possible, and have fun.