What It Means to Be American
A National Conversation

Explore : PHOTO

Artifacts

A Photograph That Speaks Volumes About Pre-War Innocence and Post-War Hope

My Parents’ 75-Year-Old Wedding Portrait Captures Our Family Just Before WWII Changed Everything

By Jim Shultz
September 15, 2016

It’s the only photograph we have of them all together.

My mother beams with the smile of an 18-year-old married only minutes before to the man who would be her husband for 49 years. My father is 21 and elegant in a gray double-breasted suit and matching fedora. To their right stands my mother’s mother, a widow who raised two children alone in the Great Depression. To their left stand my father’s parents, a pair of short and stout …

Read More >