A picture worth a thousand words

I love the Vineyard Restaurant for a lot of reasons, but the two that stand out in my mind are food and history. They have great food at the Vineyard, and it is a tremendous place to look into Madera’s past.

The other day I met Keith Rigby at the Vineyard to have lunch and talk about a photograph taken in August 1940. It was shot at Madera’s Swimming Pool Park and showed 29 kids posing around the diving board with their swimming instructor, “Pop” Petersen.

When I first saw the photo, the only person who had been positively identified was Petersen. The task given me by Karen Elmore of the Madera County Historical Society was to find out the names of as many kids as possible.

Well, the first thing I did was to run the photo in my “Yesteryears” column in The Tribune, and it didn’t take long to get a reply. Virginia Secara Gendron contacted me to say she recognized a number of the kids, since she was one of them...