Back when Eisenhower was in office I would often look at my parent’s wedding pictures. Probably what I liked most about them is that they were 3D, color slides. Two small rectangles of film mounted on silver cardboard, sandwiched between two pieces of glass and sealed up with red tape around the outside edge. To view them they would be put in a viewer that had a bulb and some lenses to enlarge the image. An interesting novelty, but not as easy to look at pictures as an album is. After a while the box with the slides and the viewer sat in a closet for decades without being opened.
Around the time of my parent’s 50th wedding anniversary I thought that it would be neat to scan the slides, make some prints and maybe even put together an album. I never did. Their anniversary came and went, and the timeliness of the project slipped away along with the gumption to do it.
For the first time in years my mom was in NY for Thanksgiving and she wanted to make dinner for us. After dinner I remembered the wedding pictures. The box came out of the closet. Everything was there and the old viewer still worked. My mom, Ben and I looked at all the pictures. It was great fun looking into the viewer and seeing the past come to life. I also felt horribly guilty. There were pictures that he would have loved to have looked at all the time, if only there had be prints of them.
Black and white photographs have a great ability to convey the essence of a subject, but color can portray a literal, life like image. What is special about these wedding pictures is that they are probably the oldest, and in many cases, the only color pictures of the people and things in them. I thought that the connection to what I saw in the pictures should be shared with everyone else who had these connections. The number of people with strong emotional ties to the people in the pictures are unfortunately shrinking. My generation is probably the last that can look at these pictures and recognize many people that were around as we grew up. I wish I had done this sooner so that I could have shared it with those who are no longer here. I can’t do anything about that now, but I am glad that it is done.
The reason I linked the pictures to this blog is so that it can be shared together via the Comments area. I spent a lot of time looking at these pictures while converting them to digital and cleaning them up. There’s a lot of stories going on in some of those pictures. There are a lot of people I don’t know in those pictures. I’d like to know who the people are and some of the stories.
Marilyn and Bob's Wedding Pictures
3 comments:
left to right--
standing: howie stone, cousin barbara barnett (daughter of mack and francis barnett, nat's 1st cousin), morty stone, barbara barnett (neighbor).
seated: marge bluttman, stuart silverman (now sloan), seymour friedman (aunt mollie's son), seymour's wife mimi, bud merle, shirley merle.
Fred, you really are amazing how you remember everyone in every picture. I mean, I know everyone but I'm older than you and I should.
thanks, but when you're 8, you remember stuff better than when you're 21 and getting married. i had less on my mind than you.
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