Friday, October 9, 2009

Baker White Armstrong, Jr: "World Famous Illusions"



Somewhere there is an obituary for Baker White Armstrong, Jr., my husband's great-uncle, but I can't find it in the boxes of disorganized stuff. I'm sure I will run across it somewhere and will provide a copy of it on this blog, but until then, we will have to be satisfied with Baker White Armstrong, Jr., as a young boy, as illustrated in the photograph with his father, Baker, Sr., to the left,  and as a young adult. Later, I will add a photo or two of Baker, Sr., as an old man, which is how I knew him when I first met him in the 1980s. He and his wife Betty, whom he had married when he was about fifty years old, were then living in the home his father had purchased in the early 1900s, in Boulder, Colorado.

So for a while, Baker is still a young man, climbing the mountains of Colorado, presenting magic shows as a magician in Houston, and, later joining the U.S. Navy in World War II.  Baker loved Colorado, as did the rest of the young Armstrongs, Katharine ("Tash"), Mary ("Mimi"), and Helen ("Hydie"). Old photo albums are full of photographs taken of them hiking in the mountains. A story was told in the family that after Baker, Jr., returned from his tour of the Philippines in World War II, he said that he had had enough humid heat: he was leaving Houston to live permanently in Boulder, Colorado. There he lived until he died in the late 1980s.









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