Please Stop At My Booth

This is my grandmother, Edna Anna Michels, dressed as a Dutch girl for a booth at the fair held at her high school, the Academy of the Visitation, in Dubuque, Iowa. The photograph was taken in either 1903 or 1904, the two years she attended the "Viz". She would have been fifteen or sixteen. I treasure this photograph because it shows her as a little "saucy" and dramatic. Also, when I knew her from the 1940s to her death in 1970, she had white hair and was not this trim.

Not only did my two grandmothers attend the Visitation, a private Catholic girls' high school founded in 1871, but my great aunts, my mother, her five sisters, my cousins, my four sisters, and I were also graduates of the Viz.

She was the best grandma a girl could have...always welcoming and loving, generous, a talented milliner, seamstress, crocheter, and quilter, and an excellent cook. But best of all, she loved her grandchildren unconditionally.