Dad and Mom both worked in the shipyards (as welders) during WWII. After the war Dad went back to work in the woods with lumbering crews. In about 1945 he was severely injured when a tree being felled struck a log he was standing on. He was catapulted into the air, crashed down, and ended up with broken ribs, a few smashed organs, and a kidney that had to be removed. (Always included when Dad told this story was the part where he woke up on the operating table, startled his doctors, and asked for more anesthesia.)
He spent a year or so in a wheelchair and unable to work. But he put this down-time to good use. First, he read the bible–old and new testaments, cover to cover (“Just wanted to know what all the fuss was about.”) Though he was never associated with any organized religion, before or after, he was an extremely well-informed agnostic.
After that project was completed, he taught himself photography, built a darkroom, and opened up shop as a family photographer, using pictures of his own kids as advertisements. Photo above is a self-portrait–note his signature above his right shoulder.
Photographer: cm jones
I think it’s common in many families to see multitudes of photos of the first kids and not nearly as many photos of the later kids. That was certainly the case for me. There are exactly two photos of me as a baby–the one below, and a similar shot taken on the same day–a double exposure with brother Gary, holding the BB gun he got for Christmas, superimposed over the top of me.
C. M. Jones 1919-1997 
As I recall, Dad was injured before the war also–and was thus physically ineligible for military service, so they both worked in the shipyards. And he had already learned photography when the war was over–he told stories of learning photography from some sort of government pamphlet while he and Mom were on the lookout–he hung blankets around the fire-finding table to create a darkroom. Then took it up again after the war.
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