Cousins, Darlene And Joyce

The Glassnaps and the Verhagens lived about twenty-five miles apart, yet Estella, Al and Joyce would travel from Appleton to De Pere at least weekly and often two or three times in a week.  Joyce and Darlene were really more like sisters than cousins.  In the summers the Verhagen girls would always spend some time with Joyce in Appleton for a vacation.  Eunice, the oldest of the Verhagen children, lived with the Glassnaps for two years while she attended a two-year college program at the Kaukauna Normal School.  The pictures on these two pages were all taken during some of their times together in De Pere and Appleton.

UPPER LEFT:  Joyce is across the street from Dar’s house in De Pere.  The white building in the left background is the old apartment house where their Grandma Aldrich lived.  It was originally a school.

LOWER LEFT:  This enlargement of a picture on a previous page is easier to see.  Joyce (left) and Darlene (right) pose on the Glassnap’s Mercury during a visit in De Pere.

UPPER RIGHT:  Joyce is sitting on a piano bench in her Grandma Glassnap’s front room in Appleton.  She’s wearing the formal she bought for the initiation ceremony when she joined Theta Rho, the girls organization connected with the Rebeccas and Odd Fellows social lodges.  She and Darlene took turns having their pictures taken that day (see the next page).

There were only two pictures taken inside the old Glassnap home on Wisconsin Avenue where both Albert and Joyce grew up, the one on the previous page and this one of Joyce’s cousin, Darlene Verhagen.  In this shot, Darlene poses at the old upright piano by the door to the front bedroom.  Note the lovely carved or deeply-pressed wooden door frame with it’s intricate leaf, seed and and floral pattern.  The multi-paneled doors boasted several kinds and shades of decorative woods and veneers to accent the beautifully burled center panels.  Originally, the room was intended as a library or sitting room off the front room.  This was the double doorway between them, where the two sliding pocket doors were pulled into the wall when the doors were opened.  The woodwork throughout the original part of the house displayed these lovely decorative leaf motifs.  In the upstairs bedrooms, they were not as intricate and detailed but were more like the oak and acorn graphic motifs on this page.  They don’t make houses like this any more, do they?  These were both time exposures as we didn’t have flash cameras then.  This accounts for some of the blur.  It’s impossible to hold still that long, and the patches of sunlight became overexposed.