One of the great mysteries of our family is my dad's father, Sidney Homer Babin. Sidney died in Chicago, it is alleged, sometime shortly after my father's birth, in 1925. At that point, my father was living with his maternal grandmother and two aunts on a farm in rural Wisconsin. Sidney's passing is "alleged" because Dad's mother, Maude, was an infamous twister of the truth, and in spite of hours of research, no death certificate for Sid has ever surfaced.
There are virtually no details of Sidney's life that survive other than: he was from Louisiana, was 15 to 20 years older than Maude, and worked as a sign painter in Chicago where he supposedly was killed in a car accident.
To keep the legend even more intriguing, only one known photo of Sidney was said to exist, an indistinct full-length shot, taken of him on a visit to the farm where my father was raised. This has been the only image I ever had of him.
Yesterday, I came down to the last unopened cache of stuff at my parent's house, a trunk in the garage - a locked trunk. Cue the music. Refer back to the March 7th post about saving stuff and you can add to that every key that ever opened any lock in their entire lives. After trying the 20th key, I grabbed a screw driver and pried the goddamn thing open.
Inside were photos of Dad's Wisconsin kin. Near the top was a beautiful portrait of a man taken in Chicago, at the C.P. Hansen Studio. And it was unmistakably Dad's father Sidney.
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