Janet thrilled to find parents in 1970s Express flashback
Eighty- year- old Express reader Janet Kerr couldn’t believe her eyes when she opened her favourite newspaper — and saw her parents looking right back at her.
The pensioner is an avid reader of our weekly ‘ Paisley’s Past’ column, which reprints our stories from decades ago.
And Janet read the recent flashback story about the Paisley Fair weather washout in 1971, which included a picture of four drookit Buddies — two of whom turned our to be her mother and father.
The astonished Glenburn woman said: “I was looking at it and I thought ‘that man looks like my dad’.
“And then’ when I looked again’ I went: ‘That is my dad!’ “Then I saw my mum sitting. “So I phoned my brother Drew, who used to work in the machine shop in the Paisley Express, and asked him if he’d got the paper. And he’d got it and saw the picture and was going to phone me.
“And then I phoned my other brother, Billy, and told him, and he went straight out to get a paper as well.”
Janet’s breath was truly taken away when she saw the picture, which was taken at Paisley’s Gilmour Street Station and shows her raincoated parents along with another couple as they waited for the train to take them on holiday at the beginning of the Paisley Fair.
“I was amazed, really amazed when I saw it,” she said.
“It was 1971, and I don’t remember seeing it at all at the time.
“I remember us being on holiday that year in Ayr and my family were there.”
So thrilled was Janet at seeing the picture of her parents that it has now made its way around the world.
“I took a photograph of it and sent it to my daughter in New Zealand,” she said.
“She was two at the time at the time of the photo.”
Janet’s parents — Andy, who worked in Babcock’s, and May Scott — were great ones for holidaying during the Paisley Fair.
“They went through to Anstruther and places like that,” she said.
“Everything closed at the Paisley Fair.”
If you recognise yourself or your relatives in any of the Paisley’s Past Pictures, we would love to hear from you. Simply call into our office at the YMCA, 39 High Street, Paisley, or give us a call on 0141 887 7911.