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Kid Days . . .

July 30, 2012

jimpageadmin Family Fun, Interesting Places, Old Photos , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Back to the old photos for a visit to the past. These were taken in Pascagoula, Mississippi in the late 1950s and seem so carefree.

In this photo, my younger brother, Jeff, attacks me with a water hose, the bounder! He’s standing in a foot tub and seems to be enjoying himself!

Here’s my mom and Jeff as we survey the results of Mom trying to put up a pup tent. Not too successful. Please note the stylin’ gunbelt I am wearing: It was the two-gun Paladin set, based upon the TV show starring Richard Boone, and it came with business cards that read:

Have Gun; Will Travel. Wire Paladin, San Francisco

Jeffrey appears to be chewing on a blue-plastic shovel. He was three years old in this photo, but, oddly enough, I believe he still chews on blue-plastic shovels.

In my opinion, the Paladin gunbelt was far more elegant than the Gene Autry, Lone Ranger or Roy Rogers gunbelts. It was black leather with a silver chess-knight emblem and was edged with silver beads. The guns were silver, too, with black-plastic grips.

There weren’t too many bandits who hung around our house on Resca De La Palma Street, and that gun belt was one of the main reasons.

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.

It Floats!

July 21, 2012

jimpageadmin Airplanes I've Known, Family Fun, Old Photos , , , , , , Leave a comment

My dad was a nut about airplanes like I am about guitars.

In 1958, we were living in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and Dad bought a brand-new Piper Super-Cub, had it fitted with pontoons at the Piper factory, and then had a ramp built on the Pascagoula River complete with a gas pump and turntable platform above the ramp so the plane could be easily swung around. I can’t imagine what that whole setup cost or why he felt the need to do it.