Win With Wilkie

Last summer I started scanning old and not so old family pictures. I never knew my Uncle Edward, as he died in 1941, 17 years before I was born. He was deaf, and died at age 27 in a TB sanitarium, so I was told. My father only told me little bits and pieces of his family history, doubtless because I didn't much ask about it. Dad died in 1990, and all his siblings are gone, too. So any family history will have to be learned through detective work.

I was struck by this photo of Uncle Ed. Nobody in my family owned a decent camera back in the day, and I suspect this picture was taken with a cheap Brownie. It looks like it is probably the last photo ever taken of him as he's in what looks like a hospital robe. That would be consistent with being in a sanitarium. I wondered about the "W" on the robe and his 'thumb's up' pose. Was that "W" the initial of the Sanitarium, by chance? Maybe I could locate a sanitarium in Brooklyn, NY with a "W" in it's name if I did an internet search.

With the mystery of the "W" in my mind, I decided to scan the picture at very high resolution. Once I got the picture on the computer, and I could enlarge it, it looked to me like Uncle Ed was wearing political buttons in the shape of a "W". That could only mean one thing. This picture was taken before the 1940 Presidential Election in November, and Uncle Ed was supporting Wendell Wilkie, not a third term for FDR.

The things one discovers when going through old photo albums.