As I’ve been working with MBOB material over the months, I’ve been trying to learn how to do digital management of Dad’s slides and am slowly getting there.

Today’s MBOB is my first venture into “here are some my own fer real photos”–except this first barn!  This is not our barn.  That’ll come down the road somewhere.

All of the photos shared today were taken by my father in the 1950s with his 35mm slide camera, using Kodachrome film.  I am blown away by the stability of Kodachrome film and Kodachrome slides. These slides have just been in storage for fifty years. Two weeks ago I had them transferred to a CD so I could work with them.

It was quite a process back in the day.  Of all the hundreds of slides he took in the just-over-ten-years between his acquisition of the camera and his death in 1962, I doubt there were more than three or four that turned out to be wasted shots.  It was too expensive and too time-consuming to do wasted shots, so he just did the very best he could with regard to composition and getting all the settings right so each picture would be worth something in terms of a record of events.

After a twenty-four or thirty-six shot roll was completely exposed, it would be carefully removed from the camera and packaged up to be mailed to Minneapolis for development.  Then about two weeks later, the slides would be returned to us in the mail.  Finding that yellow Kodachrome box in the mailbox about at about 11:00 a.m. was always a big deal.

This slide shows the clay banks along the north side of the Missouri River a few miles  south of our farm and reveals the spans of the bridge  throwing  long shadows  in mid-afternoon, letting us know that it’s a winter sun, low in the sky.

The yellow Kodachrome box in the mail meant there would be slides in the living room that evening, with our big free standing screen and Dad’s Skyline projector, manufactured by the SVE Group in Chicago.  The projector handles one slide at a time: load a slide, slide the carrier through so that one is being exposed on the screen and the alternate, empty side is now sticking out, ready to receive the next slide.  The slide gets placed in the little carrier upside down, of course,  for proper display on the screen.  That projector is sitting on the floor here in my office today.  Still in perfect working condition.  I’ve been using it to  project the slides on a wall to see how I can best use them.

We had three spots in our pasture where there were coulees with trees which became photo spots in the fall.  The scene below reveals why seven hundred acres of pasture supported only one hundred head of cattle in a good year.   The small white item just a little below dead center is one of our two pasture wells. There was a hand pump on a water tank there and this would sometimes be our destination when we would be sent “down in the hills” to pump water for the cattle.  The far distant horizon is about 15 miles from the North Dakota border. I have absolutely no idea what the dark item in the air on the right side is.  Perhaps a UFO or an attack from North Dakota of some kind.

At right is my brother and I with our best border collie, name of Patches, in the early 1950s.   In the background is our 1953 Ford parked near the old wash house where clothes was washed by a gasoline driven washing machine in the days before electricity.

The REA (Rural Electric Administration) finally made its way to us about 1952 which dates this photo as later.  We always laughed at the fact that so many pictures of our precious memories  (we decided it was a requirement) always seemed to have electrical wires somewhere. Signs of the good life.

This great waterfall photograph illustrates the interest and determination of our father that we would be cognizant of life beyond the horizon.  He took this of one of the great falls in California–perhaps Yosemite– in 1952. Perhaps it’s Bridal Veil Falls.

I’ve already had six more years of life than he had.  I’m so proud of that farmer with an eighth grade education who always saw beyond the horizon.  He never allowed his life to be defined by where he was, although he thoroughly appreciated where he was and made the most of it.  He never allowed his thoughts or opinions to be permanently defined by what he already knew, because he was fully aware that he might learn something tomorrow that would require changes in judgment.   He was big on history, geography, archaeology  photography, good music, time with relatives, hard work and taking good care of all our animals–horses, cats, dogs, chickens, cows, steers–and shooting coyotes that might harm any of them.

When the trip to California involved driving the car through a tree large enough to handle that, one had to stop half way through and take a picture of the 1949 roadster standing within the tree trunk so that the folks back home wouldn’t think you were making it all up.

Notice the canvas water bag hanging off the front bumper. That was not for drinking water but for use when climbing the mountain passes or crossing the deserts to get to Las Vegas to head north again…or to head east out of the mountains to Salt Lake City. When the engine was heating up, the bag was removed from the bumper and hung directly over the front of the radiator, inside the hood.  If the radiator boiled over, it was also the emergency supply to get to the next town.

The B-52s that ran east to west/west to east between Malmstrom AFB in Great Falls and the AFB in Minot, North Dakota were just a marvel.  And yes, we took pictures of them.

Dad organized this one with the roof edge of the east side of the house to provide a reference point.  They flew with such precision.  They were BIG.  They were frequent features in our Big Sky in Montana.  At night we would see them flying in refueling configuration, flying among the stars and passing over in majesty.

Dad would talk about what it took to make planes of this magnitude, the training required for those who managed them, and the skills and purposes of the crews who flew them.

This picture reminds me of the excellence of people who built things that worked the way they were supposed to work.  It reminds me of the character of men like our father who thought beyond their own horizons and who recognized those who could literally fly beyond our horizons.

No one generation has a lock on the kind of excellence illustrated by the men whose lives are in this photo–either at the pointy end of the contrails or behind the lens.  It can be us.

Old Faithful Went Off On Schedule–circa 1950