We Somehow Found a 1965 Navy Photo of My Dad We Didn’t Know Existed
I received a text from my mom last week of an image - no words - just the photo. My mom knows I love this stuff, and every once in a while she digs up something nostalgic and shares it with the family. Whether it be an old photo of me or my sister Sherri when we were kids or an old picture from a 1980's family day at Storytown, she knows I love this stuff.
This time, she sent a tattered photo of my father (Harry the Barber, Papa Codes) that dates way back to January of 1965 that she claims she has never remembered seeing before, so you can imagine her surprise when she accidentally found it.
At the time of the photo, my pops was a young Navy sailor in his early 20's aboard the USS Samuel B Roberts.
My father joined the Navy Reserves in1964 as a young 23-year-old, a few years before he met my mom. A year later, he found himself aboard the destroyer where he started an apprenticeship as a barber, a career that he continues to this day.
A quick note about the picture: Aside from the fact that my mom found it in a strange place, it's just so cool to see old photos of your parents isn't it? Like, it's hard to believe they were younger or our age once and had their whole lives in front of them. But photos like this one help to close the gap a bit.
The writing on the picture says, "January 10-65, Inside Barbershop" and in it, my dad is smiling proudly in his fresh, new, white barber coat. Interestingly enough, my mom and dad hadn't even met yet, that would happen a year or so later.
When my mom stumbled upon the photo, it was simply by happenstance. Something told her to look inside her father's old wallet that she hadn't touched in years. My grandfather (my mom's dad) passed away in 1993, but she had his wallet with photos and things inside as a keepsake. She remembers most of the pictures inside it: one of me and my sister, cousins, his wife, and his children, but she can't for the life of her place the photo of my dad in 1965 on the Navy ship.
And why was it in her dad's wallet?
When my dad was overseas during the Vietnam War, he often sent letters to my mom in the US, and she still has all of them. If any pictures were with those letters, they'd still be in their original envelope, that's how meticulous she was and is to this day.
So it's a bit odd that my grandfather would have had this photo in his possession before he passed, but somehow it got inside his wallet. A wallet that she had zero plans of ever looking in, but something called her to it last week. There's no explanation for that whatsoever unless someone, somewhere just wanted us to see it around Veterans Day.
Whatever the reason, we were meant to see the photo and it was fun to relive the old times with my parents when we talked about it.
Come to think of it, maybe that was the reason.
Below is the photo my mom recently found, back then front
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