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Uncle Fred, like Aunt Pisces, was not actually a blood relation of my own. He was the husband, and later the widower of my grandfather’s half-sister, Mabel. Ergo; he was for some decades, Grandma’s brother-in-law.

From everything I've ever heard, both Grandpa and Mabel were somewhat difficult people, and I gather that there was a good deal of fellow-feeling between the two who had chosen to live with them. In any event Grandma and Uncle Fred were great friends, and continued as such until Uncle Fred’s death sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s.

Grandma was widowed by the time she was 60, and Aunt Mabel had the grave misfortune to develop some form of senile dementia, possibly, but not necessarily Alzheimers, which eventually required institutionalization. By the time I was old enough to sit up and take notice, Uncle Fred was living alone in a small apartment in Alhambra, and suplementing his pension by piano tuning. I have no idea what he had done for a living when he was still working.

I was given the first of the scrapbooks as a Christmas present in 1951, to much hilarity across the rest of the family, when I was 5-and-a-half. (Fred was an awful tease.) The 2nd scrapbook, I was given for Christmas four years later in 1955.

I was a kid. They were given to me, I thought that he had made them for me.

Uncle Fred never made these books for me.

He made them to amuse Grandma.
Mabel & Fred & Herb & Ethel — 1940?

Er, just to be sure we are all on the same page; you have all read the disclaimer on the top page of this whole area regarding the futility of getting all het up over the comments or dubious attempts of humor made by people who have been dead for 50 years, right?

Just wanted to be sure of that...
These scrapbooks are made up of scans, so even at screen resolution they are large files. Also, they are scrapbooks. They are not made up of letter-sized pages. So even though .pdf tends to resize everything to whatever window will fit onscreen, to see them at their full size you will need to scroll all over the place.

The page size of the first scraspbook is roughtly 11 x 14 inches, and since these books have been exported as spreads, we are talking about a 23 x 14-inch spread. And, since the spread is the “page”, there is no easy way of splitting them up for printing. But, then, since they are exported at screen resolution I did not antcipate that anyone was going to want to print them.

The 2nd scrapbook’s pages are 11.25 x 12.3 inches, approximate. Again, it is a 23-inch spread. There are blank pages in the 2nd book.

Also, I’m sorry, but, yes, the ink/colored pencil really is that faint on some of the pages. I wasn’t able to tweak the files in any way that would make them darker.
Uncle Fred, April, 1949, Alhambra California