It’s amazing how many inside family photos involve couches. I mean, it shouldn’t be surprising — our family rooms and living rooms usually have them as a furniture centerpiece. This is all in my brain because we just replaced our main living room couch this week, and it’s a familiar mid-century style that manifests in so many of the images that I’ve reviewed.

So on this particular couch, we find Rolland Pickett with his wife, Anna Belle (Smith Akins) Pickett. Rolland is a brother of Erin’s maternal great-grandfather Hap Pickett. They are dressed for an occasion and appear polite and at-ease.

It looks like the mirror above them reflects the standard decor of the room – an armchair, a table and lamp; perhaps a shoebox on the table. Rolland sports a dark pair of suspenders, while Anna has a shell-bead necklace and a broach.

Contest Announcement!

So I like this photo in the way that it exemplifies how certain clues can uncover facts. In this case, we have some built-in help for the date. Notice the coffee table full of magazines — well growing up under a mother who subscribed to Family Circle — I readily recognized that as the title on the right.

And that kind of detail is tempting enough for me to spend an hour, as I did a few weekends ago, combing through internet crooks and crannies trying to match up which vintage cover of Family Circle magazine was represented here — just to help narrow down the approximate date of the photo. I know — you’re thinking how lucky Erin is to have married a man with these kind of interests and preoccupations — I’m not sure it gets any cooler or macho than this.

So as a contest — I challenge you to find which Family Circle cover this represents — succeed and you’ll see how it helped me narrow down the date of the photo considerably. Post the answer first in the comments, and you receive your choice of the following: A) you can guest write your own post on wise.pics; B) you can choose any photo that you want me to restore and I’ll try my best to do it; C) I’ll purchase a book that you are interested in and ship it to you.

Contest complete

Well there were a ton of entries, but sorry to report that no one succeeded in identifying the cover as this one from April 1963:

So this gives us an approximate date to work with — and we can say that Rolland is around 68 year old, and his wife is 65 years. I sure do love datable artifacts showing up in photographs!

Questions

• Any interesting life-facts about this couple?
• Where did they live and where was this photo taken?