Tag Archives: Joan Irene Gilmore

The Sudden Discovery of My Mother’s First Apartment, 70 Years Ago

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I never knew she’d lived here. Never noticed this side address. Until the old pack of photos surfaced, 1954. And here is my mother, who died when I was 12. Here she is, 20 years before I was born. I’m 30 years her elder. And I meet her on that cold February night when she was young and the present promised the future was bright.

Two Stories for Mother’s Day

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Two weird little stories for Mother’s Day. About two memorials to Patricia Ann Lynch Austin, former Jax first lady, one memorial missing a tree, the other accidentally raising hard questions about motherhood. My mother always encouraged my writing. She died three quarters of my life ago. Hopefully she’d like these two weird little stories.

Here’s the first: https://jaxpsychogeo.com/the-center-of-the-city/mother-and-child-sculpture-downtown/

& here’s the second: https://jaxpsychogeo.com/west-riverside-avondale/willowbranch-park-and-cenotaph-for-dogwood/

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The Iron Lung at Shep’s

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The iron lung stands beside the old arcade video game. Did someone die in this machine? Artist Jeff Whipple took the Salk vaccine on the sugar cube. His English teacher conducted class from an iron lung. Shep’s Discount and Salvage sells rotten baby formula, this iron lung, and Trump Rambo flags, but what’s with the plastic pigs dressed as cowboys? 

New Story: Polio in Florida, Ann Adams, the Artist Who Painted with her Teeth

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The caption said, “This card was drawn by mouth by Ann Adams, a polio patient in Jacksonville, Florida.” Ann was paralyzed from the neck down. She slept in an iron lung. For most of her life, she never drew a breath on her own. “Through perseverance, she trained herself to draw by holding a pencil between her teeth. Each original drawing takes up to two months to complete.”

The 500th Story

A Tribute to My Father

My father, Leslie William Gilmore, died Thursday morning, the 22nd day of August. He was 95 years old. These links take you to my tribute to him. It doesn’t do him justice, but it’s something.

Hammond Boulevard Exit & the “Perfect Pedophile Paradise”

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Did God so love the world that he directed the Florida Department of Transportation to cut a new exit from Interstate-10 down to the northern entrance of what Dennis Cassell called Bob Gray’s “perfect pedophile paradise”? 

Whatever Tom Messer believed about God’s desires for his predecessor Bob Gray, whose sexual abuse of children Messer shielded from the law, he believes God wants 20,000 people daily to take the new I-10 exit by the church. 

So let’s do that. Let’s go. Here’s what we find.