Music • Photography • Writing
The
Bishops
Chicago
Years
Wolf
Place
Skyway
Park
Julie
West Oak
In the fall of 1954, ground was broken, first by the kids with little shovels, later by large machines, for a new home at 1008 Milky Way Drive in a new development called Skyway Park, with the street names devoted to astronomical bodies. Here Marge poses beside the beginning of the excavation for the house. This view looks northwest toward the Rampart Range, barely visible through the haze in the distance. Skyway Park had its roots in the first rise of the Front Range, the first mountains west of the Appallachians. The kids spent many happy hours exploring the foothills to the west of this house.
By the late winter of 1955, the new house was just about finished. The car is Bob's 1953 Ford station wagon, later immortalized as the Wonder Car when Tom got it fourteen years later. (So named because you always wondered whether it would start.) This appears to have been a Sunday trip after church, judging by the way the kids are dressed. Rob, as usual, is kind of going his own way. He carries here a large flat stick for reasons unknown.
The contractor, Don Price, did a good job on the brick home but he did nothing about landscaping at all. So that chore fell to Bob in his spare time between working days and playing nights. He seeded the lawn and planted crabapple and spruce and the pernicious Chinese elm trees around the property. Marge tried a garden, leaving the weeding to the kids, but no one showed much interest in it. Bob's wheelbarrow looks like '20s or '30s vintage, without even grips on the handles. On the horizon is the long-gone 8th Street Drive-In.
Once them tow-headed Bishop Boys hit town, you just knew there was gonna be trouble. Here, Rob practices his fast draw while Tom, wearing his sombrero unconventionally, looks on. The chaps these chaps are wearing, bought at a local trinket shop, show Roy Rogers and Trigger, heroes of the day.
All the Bishop kids were active outdoors. One day Laura, out riding her bike, met a friend riding a horse. Laura tried the horse too but ended up falling off, breaking her arm. Sturdy Westerner that she was, she wheeled the bike home with one arm, the other hanging limply with a compound fracture. She went in to show her mom but Marge was on the phone and didn't notice at first. Finally Laura held it up and Marge just about fainted. Tom broke his arm once too. He and Rob were hanging out the car windows of the Ford, as usual bickering about something. Tom lost his balance and fell backward, breaking his arm. Both Laura and Tom ended up melting off the plaster casts in the rain before they were scheduled to be removed.
Sunday mornings often found the Bishop kids at the Christian Science Church in downtown Colorado Springs. Sometimes Bob would just drop them off and he and Marge would get some well-earned couple time. Some Sundays Bob would play the pipe organ at the church, foot pedals and all, which he might be planning to do here, given his tie.
The kitchen of the new house had state-of-the-art enameled metal cabinets, including a turn-table in the corner. The countertops were fairly high and Marge was only five-two. One day she got up on her knees on the counter top and reached up for a pitcher on top of the cabinets. The pitcher fell, breaking her nose. Since it was already broken, she got the doctor to take away an unflattering lump on the end.
Bob often played four or five nights a week, sometimes picking up jobs for a small group. He's seen here with some of his regular bandmates that he played with for many years. The sax player is unknown; on fiddle is Allen Uhles, who was president of the local musician's union and taught at the Deaf And Blind School; John Paul Jones played his hollow-body guitar; George Marvin was an excellent traps player; and Ron Eisenhauer played stand-up bass. This versatile group of pros could play a night's entertainment in a number of genres, hence the cowboy hats on the piano.
Louise's sister Alvina probably put together these stockings she sent for Christmas, made of felt with hand-cut letters glued to them. (The stockings still exist.) The window above goes into the kitchen from the living room, an early modification to the house to bring more light into the kitchen. Bob undoubtedly asked the kids to pull up their knees and clasp their hands. Rob, of course, had to find his own pose. Most of the photos until now have been black and white. Bob was using color film for this. Soon he would rent and then buy a better slide camera, which he used on the family vacations we took each summer.
For a few summers after moving to Colorado, the Bishops piled into the Ford and went back to Chicago to visit the relatives. The trip, before the Interstate system was finished, was slow, hot, cramped, and tedious. Then in the summer of 1957, Bob decided he wanted to see more of the beautiful state they had lived in for several years. He put a trailer hitch on the car and rented this small camp trailer and the Bishops set out to explore Colorado. This is the first of Bob's slides. His film choice this first trip wasn't very good and the slides are very low resolution.
Among the places in Colorado we visited was Maroon Bells, then as now part of the national forest system, not a national park. At that time, the gravel road led right up to the lake and we camped quite near. Now, of course, this is one of the most visited areas in Colorado and you have to take a bus to get to where you can walk to here. But the peaks still look the same.
Mesa Verde at this time was managed more for amusement than for preservation. We walked all over the walls and ladders at Sun Temple. Today people are kept a very much more respectful distance from these historic treasures.
Back home in Colorado Springs, Bob and Marge, when not consumed by the woes of four growing kids, found time to dress up and go out on the town. Bob, of course, was out many nights a week performing so it didn't have a lot of fascination left for him. Marge, having for years been stuck with the kids all day or working at the phone company, really needed to get out and be grown up once in a while. She always had a sense of fashion, seen here in her matching scarf and gloves.
Bob played for a variety of groups at the Broadmoor Hotel. One group came in and had a few different ideas for a theme song they wanted to try out and they asked Bob to play them. One was a real stand-out. You might already know it: "Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Meyer weiner..."
Despite a few problems with the Ford pulling the extra weight, the next summer Bob decided to rent the trailer again and take it out to the west coast to visit Marge's family, most of whom had moved from Chicago to California. Here Rob's seen standing on the south rim of the Grand Canyon. He's carrying a small toy, a black dog with a red nose who'd been dubbed Rudolf the Red-Nosed Dog. At one point, he dropped the dog over the side and crawled down the few feet to get it, oblivious to the thousands of feet of canyon below him. He got back up safely, wondering why the people standing around were clutching their hearts. His lack of fear of heights may have contributed to his early demise.
Marge's parents, Russell and Olive Barnes, lived in a nice little home in San Clemente, California. They joined the rest of the family at a local park for a picnic. Russell passed away just a few years later. We shared the picnic with several of Marge's siblings and more of our cousins than we could count.
Up north in the Bay Area, Rob and Tom take a break from exploring an old sailing ship on San Francisco Bay, part of a park containing a collection of historic vessels. In the background is the famous Alcatraz Prison, still in operation at the time.
We camped on Muir Beach across the Golden Gate from the city. The next morning we found this amazing raft (actually an old wooden pallet) with which we unsuccessfully tried to navigate the ocean. We were, of course, completely soaked by the time the folks were ready to go into town with us for a nice dinner in Chinatown. Mom was so pleased.
Once again the folks managed to get us cleaned up for another Sunday best picture, this one taken in 1961. The kids all look pretty spiffed up but Marge is wearing a fairly plain frock and for a good reason: she was expecting one last addition to the family.