52 Ancestors 2018 Challenge #2 Favorite Photo

My family has a ton of photos (my mother is a picture-phile who really LOVES photos. I wonder if they have Picture-holics Anonymous for that) between all the siblings & cousins & there are indeed many that I absolutely love, but I would have to say that my all time favorite photo hands down is the shot below.

Bevlie A Cook (on the right) & Volly M O'Hair,
Sunny Lane Racing Team

The above photo is of my maternal great grandfather Bevlie A. Cook who was my grandmother Vera's father. I wrote about Bevlie & this photo back during the original 52 Ancestors, 52 Weeks challenge in 2014. You can read more about Bev here, but what I love about the photo is Volly's ruffled collar. It's just so frilly that it seems a bit much for a man to me (& yes, before you ask, Volly was married to Effie Cadwallendar Hutto besides being a reverend preaching the gospel of Christ so I don't think he swung that way). I seem to remember being told somewhere that the men had to come up with their own racing "uniforms" so I imagine their wives must have sewn these outfits. Both Volly & Bev were newly married in 1900. I don't know much about Volly other than he was married into a neighboring collateral family from the Sunny Lane community where so many were related by blood or marriage, but I do know that Bev did not make a career of bicycle racing which seemed to be a pastime that all the young men in that area took part in. The family story goes that he was gone off racing so much that his wife Dora McCoy Cook prayed that his bicycle would break down so that he would have to stay home with her & sure enough, in time, it happened. The Sunny Lane community has since pretty much disappeared from Burnet County nowadays & sadly there are now few alive who remember it.