My mother wasn’t a girly girl type of person. She was athletic, taught Red Cross swimming for 60 years, and had shortish hair (swimming length) as long as I can remember.

That stated, I found this postcard of Mom with her parents. Taken in the early 1920s when they took a trip to California, it shows my mother as a little girly girl with a big bow in her hair. She’s riding in a pony cart pulled by an ostrich.

“…pulled by an ostrich….” Yeah, sure! Well, they were in California, eh!?

The cart has a name on it: Cawston Ostrich Farm, which actually was a familiar tourist attraction, it seems, in Southern California till it closed in 1935.

Though this photo is unique to my family, there are online photos of many people in similar poses at this same attraction.

The photo is one of the few that has my grandparents and my mother all in the same shot, and is the earliest photo I know of my mother.

One odd bit of family history is that my grandparents bought some property in Anaheim while in California, whether as an investment or a possible retirement place, I don’t know. My grandfather, however, died of cancer in his early 50s in 1940.

The property in California probably was sold at that time – pure speculation since no one is alive now to confirm this – and eventually became part of the parcel on which Walt Disney built Disneyland! (Of course, that was over a decade after the property most likely was sold.)