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It Was 20 Years Ago Today!

July 25, 2012

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Actually, it was 25 years ago, but what the heck! Here are some photos of the family when we lived on North Manhattan Avenue in Tampa.

Colleen is shown here watching one of her then-favorite shows, Miami Vice. Not quite sure what a three-year-old got from watching that, but I expect she loved the music and the action of it. I love Neenie’s expression here; the photo itself isn’t all that great.

Next we have Aaron in his wading pool in the backyard. The colors are just so vivid in this Kodachrome photo. Gosh, I do miss Kodachrome film! Paul Simon had it right when he sang:

Kodachrome
You give us those nice bright colors
You give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah!
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away”

It wasn’t Mama that took our Kodachrome away, but the digital-camera revolution.

The camera used here was my Nikon Nikkormat FT3, which, in my experience, had the best internal light meter of any SLR I ever used. Nothing else ever came even close.

We wind up with a Christmas-time photo taken at Patty’s brother Billy’s house in Brandon, Florida in 1986. When I posted this photo on Facebook without specifying the location where it was taken, my sister-in-law Sheila immediately commented, “Hey; that was our couch!” Yes; Sheila; it certainly was.

Shown are Neenie, Aaron and Patty.

A Pascagoula Christmas!

July 23, 2012

jimpageadmin Family Fun, Interesting Places, Old Photos , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

These are probably the first photos I ever took, using my Dad’s Kodak Signet 80 camera, which was Kodak’s highest-end camera at that time. It was a 35mm rangefinder camera with interchangeable lenses. My dad picked it up in Mexico City when someone there stole his Nikon rangefinder from his hotel room. At that time, of course, SLR cameras were quite rare; Nikon didn’t offer one until a year or so later.

The Signet 80 was a great camera and totally silent, unlike the clunk-producing early SLRs and I used that camera well into the 1970s, even after I had Nikon SLRs and medium-format cameras of my own.

So these were taken in Pascagoula, Mississippi in 1958. I was in the first grade. The Christmas Festival that year was a big deal for me, because my dad flew Santa onto the river with his float plane, and a little boat picked Santa up from my dad’s plane and brought him to the docks. Mr. John Quinn, my dad’s friend who owned the menhaden plant mentioned earlier, lifted me up onto a 55-gallon drum because I was little. Mr. Quinn is in the dark-blue-black-and-white checked shirt in the second photo, and his wife, Jane, is standing next to him in a red-and-black checked shirt. Here comes Santa on the small boat.

In this crowd scene, you can see the Puss ‘n Boots cat-food factory in the background. That’s where I learned to ride my bicycle; there was a big concrete area in front of the factory which was vacant on the weekends. I had gotten a seven-transistor radio from Western Auto (it was sapphire blue) and I taped it to the handle bars of my bike so I could listen to WTIX (Tiger Radio!!!) from New Orleans as I rode around. They played Elvis and Chuck Berry and especially Buddy Holly.

In this photo, you can see the Pascagoula High School Marching Band. Hard to believe these lovely young ladies would be in their 70s today.