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Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY Reunion re-creates family photo I recently completed sorting all the photographs we have taken over the years and putting them in one place -- one of those cardboard boxes in which businesses store documents. I have been unable to pinpoint the year in which many of the photographs were taken, much less the date, because most film developers years ago didn't stamp the date on the back like they do now. About all I can do is segregate the pictures by decades. In a large manila envelope marked "The Sixties," there is a snapshot that is undated but has become a favorite of mine. From the viewpoint of a professional photographer, it is poorly composed. There are two little girls and a boy playing in the sand, too far away from the camera. There is too much of the empty beach and not enough of the kids. But the picture reminds my wife, Nora, and me of the years when we would drive our 1959 Volkswagen bus to Brookings two or three times a summer. We would stop for lunch at a drive-in there, then pile in the bus again and drive to a secluded beach north of town. Some of our trips would be in the fall after the weather turned colder, but the children loved it, cold or not. Other trips in the bus included driving down to Los Angeles to visit my parents about once a year during the late '60s. While I-5 had been almost completed through Oregon, only small sections of the freeway were finished in California. Most of the trip was on old Highway 99. We always seemed to get lost in Sacramento, because there the highway became two one-way streets -- southbound through the western part of the city, northbound through the east side. I would somehow make a wrong turn near the end and would wind up back where we started. We were glad when the freeway reached Sacramento. Highway 99 went through the center of every town in the valley: Lodi, Stockton, Modesto, Fresno. We would stop at a motel somewhere along the way, as driving straight through from Medford to Los Angeles in a slow bus called for more stamina than we had. The kids would be full of energy after being in the bus for six or more hours. They would jump on the beds to test them out. It was wonderful just listening to them laugh. Then our Volkswagen bus would meet its toughest test, getting over the "Grapevine," the name informally given to the steep highway over the mountains south of Bakersfield. The right-hand lane of the highway was posted as being only for trucks, but our little bus had such feeble power that we were passed by most trucks. Eventually, thousands of miles later, the motor in the bus quit while Nora was driving near Ashland, and we went on to more modern transportation. All of that was about 30 years ago. But back to that 1960s snapshot of our youngsters at the beach. We sort of re-created that scene two Saturdays ago when Nora and I held a family reunion at Yachats on the central Oregon Coast. It was not a large event -- just our three kids, their spouses and the three grandchildren -- but it made up in warmth what it lacked in size. In the past, we've heard other people talk negatively about their family reunions, but ours really worked. The weather was perfect and we had a great time. The grandchildren played in the brown sand at Beachfront State Park. Four-year-old Sadie made a cake out of sand and stuck several small sticks into the top to represent candles. Three-year-old Franklin was fascinated by the foam where the waves ended up on the beach. Two-year-old Tasha stuck closely to her mother and father at first, but later overcame her shyness when she found a crab's shell tangled in some seaweed that had washed ashore. A lot of new toys for playing in beach sand have been introduced in the 30 years between the picture in Brookings and our recent excursion at Yachats. One toy the grandchildren had was a plastic tower about a foot high with a sort of water wheel inside. The wheel moved by pouring sand through a slot in the top. Our son brought two folding chairs down to the beach for Nora and me, and we sat there and talked about how a photograph of our grandchildren now would almost be identical to the one taken of their parents so many years before at Brookings. (Hank Henry is a retired Jackson County commissioner and a former radio and television announcer. Call him at 772-9055.) Prime Times front page Mail Tribune front page Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA