This is my story. Part remembrance, part fact and a whole lot of my own perspective. Family members will disagree with this aspect or that detail. Some might see it in a completely different light. That’s okay – while we walk the same path, it’s a different journey for each of us.
My father passed away in 2014. He was 84 years old. My parents divorced when I was in my 20’s. I left for college at 18 and returned home only for visits. My mother died in 1994 – she was our anchor. Dad and I spoke frequently by phone for many years and visited periodically, but we were not emotionally close. Our conversations leaned toward the obligatory and routine. As time went by we were both busy with new families and separated by considerable geography. I would characterize our relationship as one of acquaintances. Lots of familiarity, but little closeness. We didn’t speak at all during his final months.
Throughout my childhood Dad had a Bolsey 35MM camera with a manual light meter. He could be obsessive about taking pictures of the mundane. The same train switch from 5 different angles. Every mammal, bird and reptile in the zoo. He developed most of the film into slides, a few into prints.
It was a running joke in the family about these slides. He was forever arranging and categorizing them into boxes and carousels. Invariably a few were backwards, upside down or out of order. Stopping mid slide show to rearrange was the norm. We weren’t the most patient or appreciative audience. There came a point where he stopped showing his slides. He kept taking pictures though. Three thousand of them.
When my brothers and I went up to Alaska for his memorial service we found the slides. Not that they were lost, they were right there on shelves in the basement of the house he’d lived in for 57 years. The house I lived in for the first 18 years of my life until I moved out of state. They were scattered around on different shelves, some lying loose and covered in years of dust. There was a semblance of order to them and you could see that he was still in the midst of arranging them – just as he had been doing for the past 60+ years.
Neither of my brothers wanted the slides, nor did anyone else. I didn’t think I wanted them either, but it just didn’t seem right to me that something so important to my father wouldn’t find a home with one of us. So I took them. Seven metal boxes and way too many plastic carousels full of 3,000+ slides. I also grabbed the Pana-Vue slide viewer and Dad’s old electric slide sorter – a backlit panel that held 40 transparencies at a time.
A few weeks after arriving back home I reluctantly sat down at the dining room table to check out these little cardboard and transparency squares that had so interested my father. I had no idea what I would find. I guessed it would be a boring and short lived endeavor. Instead I found my childhood. I had lost that – I just didn’t know it until I found it tucked away in the slides.
The pictures started in 1950 and went up to the mid 80’s. It was a visual history of my parents’ marriage and my childhood. That includes my brothers’ childhood, but this is my story and I don’t wish to make them carry the burden of my perspective – it’s enough for each of us to have to wrestle with our own.
I knew I had to digitize the slides, just not 3,000. I’d have to do some serious winnowing. For close to two months, hours at a time I viewed, arranged and categorized each and every slide. I did my best to divide them by decade, year and season – 30 years worth. Dad had painstakingly written dates, places or names on about 80% of the slides, many later in life when his hands were unsteady and his writing shaky.
I had to do a bit of sleuthing for the early slides he hadn’t dated. I discovered you can go online and date slides by the cardboard mounts/edges. Once I had them arranged by date it took me three go throughs to get down to 1,000. For this story I whittled that number down by another two thirds.
While this is first a pictoral history of my parents’ marriage and my childhood it also offers a glimpse of life beginning in the 50’s in what at the time was considered “The Last Frontier”. Enjoy.
