Judy DeVoe is eager and pink-cheeked, sitting in a big brown chair, showing you her cute plaid patterned zip-a-doodle outfit.

I imagine her parents, Don and Betty, still so fresh into the parenting life and deciding to go get a pro-shot of their firstborn.

The back has some penciled writing of her age being 9 months, so places this around December of 1941 — that’s around the time of the Pearl Harbor attack that launched the US into WWII. That would have been the startling news of the time.

So we have a relatively precise dating, a clear identity, and an assumed context of baby photo time, I’ll leave a bit of uncertainty as to location, though I assume this is a photo studio in Lodi area.

Infobox

Questions

• Did WWII have any impact on the DeVoe family in Lodi?
• What are Judy’s earliest memories of childhood?