Life, in Particular

Snerby Buckskin et al

By Kevin Steel ⋅ December 24, 2006 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Home for the holidays and over the last few days, I have been scanning the family archive of pictures. I came across a fascinating 1942 class photograph taken outside the Saskedge School, a one room schoolhouse north of a town named Leader in south eastern Saskatchewan near the Alberta border. At that time, the wooden building is obviously unpainted, though my mother remembers it as white. The community must have come up with the money for the paint shortly after the photo was taken. My mother, now 73, is the little nine-year-old girl seated on the bottom left. When I pulled the tiny 2-inch by 3-inch print out of the family album and handed it to my mother, she looked closely at it and immediately started chuckling to herself. “Snerby Buckskin,” she said almost under her breath. Pardon me? She explained that the little farm boy standing behind her, with his cap on backwards, eyes squeezed shut and holding his breath was a fellow named Irving Ritz. He had been given the nickname “Snerby Buckskin” by his older brothers. Why the nickname, she couldn’t remember, though she mentioned sadly that one of the older brothers, Helmut Ritz, had passed away in the last few years. That nickname could just be one of those quirky childhood things that defies logical explanation, (like my younger brother at age 3 naming his teddy bear Dake-a-laken while his older siblings picked more or less logical names for theirs, like Blackie for the panda, or Goldie for the gold bear etc.). At any rate, “Snerby Buckskin” should be written into the Nickname Hall of Fame, if such a place were to ever exist.

A couple of days after I scanned the picture, I had a chance to show it on my laptop to the young sons of a friend of mine, ages 11 and 9 respectively. My purpose was to encouraged them to find someone to give that nickname to in order to keep it going. “The name of Snerby Buckskin must not die!” I proclaimed. Oh yes, I almost forgot. “See if you can pick out that lady in this picture,” I said to the boys as I pointed to my mother seated on the sofa across the room from where the boys sat. Over the span of 62 years, without hesitation their fingers shot forth at the screen to the correct image, to the little girl seated bottom left.

There are a couple of interesting things in the photo that went unnoticed until I scanned it at 300 dpi (then bumped it up to 1200 dpi, then scaled it up to 12 inches before dropping the dpi back to 300). My mother had always noticed the two boys in the window but has no idea who they were or why they were there. If they were supposed to be in the photograph, why were they inside? she wondered. As we looked closer, we discovered there were actually three boys in the window, not two. You can just make out the ghostly image of a third in the middle. My mother has no memory of who took the picture, but the photographer seems to have deliberately moved the camera to include that window, so obviously wanted them in the frame. Also, there appears to be someone standing behind the young girl in the upper left. You can see what looks like a white shirt and a suspender, and a bit of a cap. What happened to this person? Who was it? Were they hiding? Another mystery in this delightful little photograph.