I'm glad you liked that one. I was actually a bit worried that is was self- serving of me to post it here.

My sister has the photo albums of my Grandparents' times in Ceylon (where my Mother was born in '31) and Singapore. They left before the new, heavily armed, Japanese Imperial neighbors moved in.

I believe this is the only photo showing the Mannlicher (I had some copies made decades ago), but their other photos offer a remarkable view of life at that time and place for a 'foreign' (U.S.) executive and his young family in the waning years of the British Empire.

One of my favorites is a group shot of some very happy looking men standing between a couple of beer kegs on the grounds of the Swiss Club with their very fasionably dressed British wives lined up neatly behind them in deck chairs. There are cricket bats laid aside and a couple of the men are holding baseball accoutrements as my Grandfather (grinning widely) had just taught them to play the 'all American' game. In stark contrast to the men's expressions are the dour, unapproving stares of the ladies as if to say, "this simply isn't cricket, now, is it?"

When the National Geographic writers and photographers came to Singapore to do a story about 'war jitters' and preparations (who would dare attack 'fortress Singapore'?), they were directed to the Swiss Colony and to the 'few Americans over there'. My Mother and Uncle (born in Singapore 9 years earlier) acted as guides to the photogs.

For any of you with National Geographic collections, my mother is in the July, 1940 issue in a full page photo titled "The lady and the tiger in Singapore". She is pointing at a tiger pelt being offered for sale at an open marketplace. The caption reads, in part, "...the pigtailed lass is the daughter of an American here who buys rubber for Goodyear."

That photo is loaded in to a now defunct computer, a copy of the magazine is around here somewhere.