Hi family and friends. Today's "episode" of the Ralph Family Photo Album is titled "Comics"...and you will shortly see why!
(Two photo files and one text file are attached) In the 1949 class photo, Pat Vermeer is seated in row two (from the front) in the second seat and I'm at the far right of row two.
Comics
I attended kindergarten and first grade at Castro Valley Elementary School School where our dad had attended school 3 decades earlier. Population was on the increase in Castro Valley after the war in the late 1940’s and Kindergarten was held in an authentic adobe structure that was built in 1938 by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to help reduce unemployment. I started first grade in a old wooden “portable” until being transferred to Redwood Elementary School across the street from where dad grew up on Redwood Road.
Class was temporarily held in a hallway until we could be transferred once again, this time to Marshall School that was still under construction. Skipping the balance of first grade, I started second grade at Marshall where I ultimately completed elementary school.
It’s been nearly 70 years and my elementary school memories are now mostly only what I can recall from looking at fading class photos. I do remember that one of my first grade Redwood School classmates was an 8 year old blond Pat Vermeer. Years later I learned that Pat’s father was Al Vermeer, a highly regarded and successful cartoonist that penned Priscilla’s Pop, a “gag a day” comic strip and color Sunday feature. Priscilla’s Pop was syndicated by the Newspaper Enterprise Association and appeared in 400 newspapers across the county for nearly 30 years beginning in 1946. Vermeer’s strip featured the Nutshell family including Priscilla, an elementary school aged girl with parents Hazel and Waldo Nutshell trying to make ends meet in a small town much like Castro Valley. Also appearing in the daily strip were her older brother Carlyle, friends Hollyhock and Stuart and her dog Oliver. Ongoing story lines included Priscilla’s obsession of wanting to have her own horse and Waldo’s thrifty daily lunch consisting of mashed potato sandwiches in order to make mortgage payments. At the time I had no idea that I sharing a classroom with the actual “Priscilla”!
Al Vermeer drew his final strip was in 1976 and he retired to Humbolt County where he passed in 1980. Much of his work is stored and cataloged at the Syracuse University Library in New York, and pieces occasionally become available on EBay. Did Pat finally get her horse? (There were a lot of horses in Castro Valley in those days), Did Waldo ever get tired of mashed potato sandwiches and did he finally pay off his mortgage? Like the Nutshell’s, our parents struggled to make ends meet although we never had mashed potato sandwiches that I can remember, but we did eat a lot of home grown tomatoes. How did the thousands of other comic strip story lines based around the Vermeer family’s Castro Valley experience play out in real life? and I wonder what ever happened to Pat.
Bill 7/5/20
