Sorry, no bathing beauties here!

Northern Indiana is known for it's two largest lakes, Wawasee and Tippecanoe. Then there's Big Barbee and Little Barbee too. But there are numerous small lakes in Kosciusko County. So it was that, while growing up, we spent quite a bit of time at the lakes. Aunt Jane had a cottage and later, a small trailer, at Goose Lake. We lived not far from Barbee Lakes. And the town of North Webster, where I went to school and worked, was on the west side of Lake Webster.

Apparently though, during all those lakeside visits there was no camera around (thank goodness). Even as a youngster, me in a bathing suit was not a pretty site! In all of the family picture albums I found only one of a family member in bathing suit, of my grandmother and her sister, and it was contributed to last year's edition of the COG.

When I was about 10 years old we moved to a "modern" home in a subdivision we called Whitville (because it was developed by Gene Whitacre). It was on what was then called the Armstrong road, which was the "main drag" between North Webster and the south side of Lake Tippecanoe a few miles to the west. In the summertime we'd have some fun with the "lakers" looking for the Tippey Dance Hall, which was "the" place to go on a Saturday night for young adults. We'd sit out in the front yard and invariably someone would stop and ask how to get to the Dance Hall and we'd tell them "you can't get there from here." Ah, the joys of youth. It took so little for us to be happy back then.

But I digress. One of the things that my brothers and I used to do after we moved to Whitville, was walk. Everywhere. We had to look after our little sister so we'd put her in the wagon and walk to the lake, which was about two miles away. But along the way, we would pick up pop bottles from alongside the road and put them in the wagon with my sister. The Jot-Em-Down grocery store was "sort of" on the way to the public access area of the lake and we would stop there to cash in the pop bottles. Of course, we immediately spent it on candy and pop! Then it would be off to the lake for a cool swim.

The picture below is of my brother and his son in June 1983 on the occasion of my nephew's second birthday. My brothers in-laws had a lakeside house on Chapman Lake, which is near Warsaw.


Photograph Copyright © 1983 by Rebeckah R. Wiseman

This post was written for the 74th edition of the Carnival of Genealogy :: Annual Swimsuit Edition.