Magnet50
Magnet50 OP t1_ja7nlqg wrote
Reply to comment by Howwasthatdoneagain in My mother, about 18 years old in a hand-tinted black & white photograph taken in Istanbul, Turkey, guessing 1947 or so. by Magnet50
I used to do black & white portraits that I would hand tint, using oil-based colored pencils and oil paint on fiber-based paper. Intricate and painstaking work.
Magnet50 OP t1_ja67lqs wrote
Reply to comment by Own-Tooth4816 in My mother, about 18 years old in a hand-tinted black & white photograph taken in Istanbul, Turkey, guessing 1947 or so. by Magnet50
She was.
Magnet50 OP t1_ja67id4 wrote
Reply to comment by TGByrom in My mother, about 18 years old in a hand-tinted black & white photograph taken in Istanbul, Turkey, guessing 1947 or so. by Magnet50
She was a beautiful woman.
Magnet50 OP t1_ja67fy5 wrote
Reply to comment by WomanNotAGirl in My mother, about 18 years old in a hand-tinted black & white photograph taken in Istanbul, Turkey, guessing 1947 or so. by Magnet50
She was born in Izmir, Turkey. Her younger brother was sickly so she was sent to Istanbul to live with grandparents. Her parents and brother moved to Istanbul later.
She was accepted into Robert’s College, which, despite its name is a 5 year high school. The first year is intensive English and the remaining 4 years are taught in English, except for a Turkish history class. She already spoke French (spoken in the house), Spanish, Turkish and Italian and as I learned many years later, about 200 words in Greek.
She went to work for the manager of the Pan Am station at Ataturk Airport and in 1948/49 a Pan Am radio-officer/navigator asked her for an appointment with her boss. She asked the reason and he said he needed an advance on his salary. She suggested that he budget better and sent him away. On the next trip he had he asked her out. Their first 5 dates were chaperoned by her aunts.
About a year later, they married in three ceremonies, one in a Catholic Church, one Turkish civil ceremony and one ceremony at the American consulate.
She went to live Queens, New York with my father and had a job as a simultaneous Turkish/French/Spanish/English translator until my older brother came along.
My father was by then flying for Aramco Airlines before Aramco offered him a significant new role in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, which is where I was born.
Magnet50 OP t1_ja9005t wrote
Reply to comment by karenjs in My mother, about 18 years old in a hand-tinted black & white photograph taken in Istanbul, Turkey, guessing 1947 or so. by Magnet50
He parents were fairly well-to-do and she was raised in a house with servants. Going from that to a small apartment in Queens was a shock. In Saudi Arabia my father was ‘senior staff’ and we had a servant named Sebastian who practically raised me. She knew what went on but didn’t hover.