This is My Story
Part remembrance, part fact, and a whole lot of personal perspective. Family members may disagree with this aspect or that detail. Some might see it in an entirely different light. That’s okay. While we may walk the same path, it’s a different journey for each of us.
The Facts
My father passed away in 2014 at the age of 84. My parents separated after I left for college and divorced when I was in my twenties. 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 over the years and visited periodically, but we were not emotionally close. Our conversations tended to be routine and obligatory. As time passed, we were both busy with new families and separated by considerable geography. I would characterize our relationship as one of acquaintances—plenty of familiarity, but little closeness. We didn’t speak at all during his final months.
The Camera and the Joke
Throughout my childhood, Dad had a Bolsey 35mm camera with a manual light meter. He could be obsessive about photographing the mundane: the same train switch from five different angles, every mammal, bird, and reptile in the zoo. He developed most of the film into slides, with only a few made into prints.
It became a running family joke—those slides. He was forever arranging and categorizing them into boxes and carousels. Invariably, a few would be upside down, backwards, or out of order. Stopping mid–slide show to rearrange was standard practice. We weren’t the most patient or appreciative audience. Eventually, he stopped showing them. But he never stopped taking pictures.
Three thousand of them.
The Discovery
When my brothers and I went to Alaska for his memorial service, we found the slides. Not that they were lost—they were right there on the basement shelves of the house he’d lived in for 57 years. The house I called home for the first 18 years of my life.
The slides were scattered across different shelves, some lying loose, coated in decades of dust. There was a semblance of order—you could see he was still mid-arrangement, just as he had been for over 60 years.
Neither of my brothers wanted the slides. No one else did either. I didn’t think I wanted them, but it didn’t seem right that something so important to our father wouldn’t find a home with one of us. So I took them—seven metal boxes and far too many plastic carousels holding 3,000+ slides. I also grabbed the Pana-Vue slide viewer and Dad’s old electric slide sorter, a backlit panel that could hold 40 transparencies at a time.
Sitting Down with the Past
A few months after returning home, I reluctantly sat down at the dining room table to look at these little cardboard-and-celluloid squares that had so fascinated my father. I didn’t know what I’d find. I assumed it would be a boring and short-lived endeavor.
Instead, I found my childhood.
I hadn’t realized it was missing until I discovered it tucked inside those slides.
The Archive
The pictures began in 1950 and continued through the mid-1980s. It was a visual history of my parents’ marriage and my childhood. That includes my brothers’ childhood too, of course—but this is my story. I don’t expect them to carry the burden of my perspective. It’s enough for each of us to wrestle with our own.
I knew I had to digitize the slides—just not all 3,000. Some serious winnowing was in order. For close to two months, hours at a time, I viewed, sorted, and categorized every single slide. I did my best to organize them by decade, year, and season—thirty years’ worth.
Dad had painstakingly labeled about 80% of them with dates, places, or names, many written later in life when his hands were unsteady and his writing shaky.
For the early, unlabeled slides, I had to do some sleuthing. I learned you can date slides by the design of the cardboard mounts. Once I had them sorted by date, it took me three rounds of edits to get the number down to 1,000.
For this story, I whittled that down by another two-thirds.
What This Is
While this is first and foremost a pictorial history of my parents’ marriage and my own childhood, it also offers a glimpse of life beginning in the 1950s in what was then considered The Last Frontier.
