When Roger was helping my dad move the last of his belongings out of storage and into his apartment, he came across a box marked "pictures." Dad was going to throw it away, but Roger rescued it. He knew I would want to look through it.
The majority of the box is filled with pictures from different Episcopal conventions that Dad attended when he was still a priest ~ I think several times he acted as his diocese’s official photographer. But I was able to find a few gems hidden among all of the convention pictures.
There are two binders that contain slides and some negatives. Most of the slides are incredible. I wish I had the negatives for them. There are slides of wildlife, flora and fauna, and a few of me, my mom, and other people from my childhood. Also in the box I found a few pictures worth keeping; one of me with my "pet lobster"
(explanation: we went to Maine a lot for vacation, and one year we decided to try steaming lobsters at our campsite ~ I had a great time playing with the lobsters (with rubber bands on their claws, of course) before sending them to their death); two prints of my friend Nettie and a boy whose name escapes my memory sitting on a fence at some farm we went to on a field trip during summer VBS,
a nice print of my mom, a couple of prints of me from those lovely awkward teenage years of 8th and 9th grade, as well as about a dozen proof sheets (that I wish I had the negatives for).
You see, when I was a kid, we always had a darkroom. Dad and I would develop our film, then print the pictures we liked. It was really cool having our own darkroom. When we lived in New York, the darkroom was in our basement. It was a little damp, but it was workable. When we moved to Montana, we were glad to be able to put the darkroom in a room that wasn’t damp. We lived in the apartment above the church, and the darkroom was in one of the closets downstairs in the main church building. What we didn’t expect was that that room would flood. The first flood destroyed all of our darkroom equipment (including the projector) ~ I can’t even begin to guess at how much all of that equipment cost. The second flood not only took out all of the replacement darkroom equipment, it also destroyed a large portion of the prints, slides and negatives we had stored in there.
Those floods didn’t really mean a whole lot to me until I became an adult. I started thinking about all of the pictures Dad and I had taken, and all of the film and prints we had developed. I had forgotten about the floods. When my dad reminded me that most of the negatives, prints and slides were destroyed in those floods, I wanted to cry. Taking pictures and spending time in the darkroom constituted a huge chunk of my time as a kid ~ and all of that work has been wiped out.
When Roger rescued the box of pictures from the garbage, I was absolutely thrilled. And even though the majority of the box is stuff I will probably throw away anyway, those few gems I was able to locate were well worth the time I spent going through the box, sorting the prints, and holding the slides and negatives up to the light box for viewing. They’re very precious to me.
The one print/slide/negative I didn’t find in the box was the picture I took when I was 9 years old for a photography contest. My dad and I entered a photography contest the local library was holding. He told me if I placed higher in the contest than he did, he would buy me my own camera. I was determined to do well ~ I really wanted my own camera. And I did well ~ I won first place! Unfortunately, it didn’t occur to me at the time to save a copy of that photograph. When I started asking around about it a few years ago, no one seemed to have a print of that picture. I even called the library that held the photo contest to see if they still had the print. No luck.
Just last week Dad finished unpacking everything. He had 2 boxes of prints and photo mats left to go through; he told me that when he was finished picking out the prints he wanted to hang up in his apartment I could have the rest. A couple of days later he gave me a box full of the prints he decided not to keep; also included in the box were a few snapshots he thought I might want. As I went thorough the snapshots, I found a small "photo album" book. Inside were pictures I had taken of my friends in junior high and high school. But, the very last picture in that booklet made me jump up and down for joy. It was a 3×4 1/2 glossy black and white print of my "award winning" photograph!!
(please realize all of these photos have been scanned into my computer on my printer/scanner/fax/copier machine ~ they’re not necessarily the best scans)
I also found a gem I wasn’t expecting: a photo of me with my reward camera; a Canon AEprogram ~ a camera I still use occasionally even now.
I have other "great" prints I plan to scan into my computer and post. I hope you enjoy these old photos and memories as much as I do.
