Music • Photography • Writing
The
Bishops
Chicago
Years
Wolf
Place
Skyway
Park
Julie
West Oak
While preparing breakfast one morning Marge told Tom something she said she hadn't told anyone else: that she was expecting a baby. She was over forty already and wasn't planning to have another. It turned out to be a complicated pregnancy when she contracted severe dermatitis that required first that she be wrapped in cold, damp sheets and then further required (at least so her doctor thought) injections of cortizone, a relatively new medication that turned out to be hazardous to use during pregnancy. Julie joined the family on September 14, 1961, in Colorado Springs. She was born with black, curly hair that soon fell out and was replaced by red and then blonde hair. She had stomach ulcers as well, meaning we had to clean up a lot of what she ate. She loved mashed potatoes.
In a few months Julie got over most of her early problems and turned into the darling of the family although, judging by her expression, the feeling wasn't necessarily mutual. The Christmas tree always sat in this corner of the living room but this year it's been reduced to fit on top of the combination television and what was called HiFi back then: high fidelty radio and record player.
Part of the holiday tradition for the Bishops was the magnificent feast Marge put together every year, often roast turkey with all the trimmings or a standing rib roast with Yorkshire pudding. Here she's standing by a table of appetizers, including shrimp toothpicked to full heads of iceburg lettuce.
After dinner Bob would sit down at his Laughead upright piano and bang out some Christmas carols for us to sing. Julie was an early music critic. Bob rarely played at home, using his piano just to work up new tunes. But the kids all learned "Heart And Soul" and kept the keys dust free.
In 1961, the Broadmoor Hotel, which is where Bob played more often than anywhere else, opened the Golden Bee, an English-style pub with a bar imported from a London pub called the Golden Lion. To promote it, the hotel dressed Bob (left, flirting with the barmaid), Allen Uhles, and another gent in Beefeater's outfits and had them pose for this classic postcard. Bob would play Sunday nights at the Bee until 1992.
Even though Marge and Bob both worked, there were five hungry mouths to feed. Julie decided she had been idle long enough. She dyed her hair dark and became a topless dancer named Schotzi. The drooling became kind of her signature move. She got not just one big hand but two. She had to give it up when someone raised the possibility that she might be underage. Actually, one notable thing about this image is that Julie is the first of our family to wear disposable diapers, a relatively new invention. Few people grow nostalgic about cloth diapers.
By her first summer, Julie was the perfect age to employ a couple of doting grandparents. Louie and Louise were happy to oblige, driving out from Chicago in Louie's Chevy Impala, a car later driven by both Betty and Tom. Louie, who had spent much of his career driving a milk truck on the hectic streets of Chicago, was a terror to ride with. Louise never learned to drive, due in part to her stiffened leg.
Having free babysitting, Bob decided to load the family up in the Ford for a trip again but this time without the trailer. His cousin Frank Kandlik lived up in Seattle and it turned out that the Seattle World's Fair, for which the Space Needle was built, was happening that summer. Along the way, the Bishop kids tried floating in the Great Salt Lake, which is remarkably easy to do. If Tom looks less comfortable than the others, it's because he had skin issues of his own which the very salty water irritated.
The Kandliks owned a small cabin on Bainbridge Island, across Puget Sound from Seattle, which the Bishops used for several memorable days. The tide was in when we got there but the next morning had gone out, which left the landlocked Bishop kids thinking that somehow someone was draining the ocean. But then it came back a few hours later. There was a small float raft out from the shore at high tide and marooned at low tide, and nearby Frank kept a crab trap.
Frank Kandlik owned not just a good power boat, he also had this little rowboat with an outboard motor that proved endlessly entertaining. Here Rob casts off the boat but almost doesn't make it on himself. Tom is driving, wearing a floppy straw hat. Another new aspect of Seattle was that the sun didn't go down until almost ten in the summer. One evening Rob and Tom were out in the boat and got the call to come in to dinner. Tom decided to row back to the cabin but soon discovered that a running tide can go faster than a rowboat.
One day Tom got shanghaied into being a galley slave aboard the rowboat. Rob, dwarfed by his unfastened life preserver, doesn't spare the lash to get the most out of the slave before he drops dead. In the background are the crab trap and float mentioned above. The power boat is moored to the float.
Marge was always up for something new and she really wanted to try waterskiing, which Frank's power boat could power. Here one of Frank's daughters helps Marge get ready with her skis pointed right and a firm grip on the handle. Marge took right to it, skiing along with perfect form except for the fact that the waterline was right around the bridge of her nose. She soon gave up.
While we were on the Olympic Peninsula, we drove up to Port Angeles and then took the ferry "Coho" across the Strait of Juan De Fuca up to Victoria in British Columbia. It was great fun. We had tea and crumpets at the Empress Hotel, saw the botanical gardens, and enjoyed our first trip outside the United States. Everyone looks impatient for the ferry to get going; Rob winks at the camera wearing his reversible jacket.
Back home in Colorado, Bob, now known to these guys as "Bish," was back at work, this time playing a full-on cowboy gig up in Rotten Log Hollow, a pavilion and cook pit that the Broadmoor Hotel bussed groups of tourists up to for an evening of The Sons of The Pioneers and grilled steaks. This is the same nucleus of musicians: Ron Eisenhauer, Bob, Allen Uhles, and John Paul Jones. When Tom ran a lawn and garden business he cut John Paul's lawn. He was warned to watch out for the fierce wildlife, presumably dogs. So Tom trepidaciously entered the backyard, only to find that the wildlife was actually just some slow-moving box turtles.
Bob was certainly never more than a drug-store cowboy. But he had a legitimate claim on being the romantic Frenchman, since his grandfather was actually born in France. So he dressed up appropriately one Halloween night. It seems to be working on the masked redhead holding the drink.
Marge, having worked at the phone company for some time, started looking around for better opportunities. In what seemed a bit like a sideways move at first, she took a job as a switchboard operator at a new California-based company in charge of programming the computers for the new NORAD defense complex under Cheyenne Mountain.