There Are Never Too Many Bicycles

This is a weird little photo.  It looks like the whole family has come out to admire the bike.  That's something I can understand.

Living Room Nude

Once again, It's time to embarrass grandma.  As I've noted many times before, I spent decades working in photo labs.  In all the years I printed black & white photos, I never had a weak go by that I didn't print "personal" photos.  There were lots of amateur pin-ups, naked wives and girlfriends, some naked men, the occasional shot of people having sex, and a surprisingly large amount of cross dressing.  Now, I started printing well after the invention of Polaroid instant photography, worked well into the digital age, and pretty much specialized in black & white.  All things considered, I've come to the conclusion that there are hundreds of millions of such photos floating around out there.  So why are they so hard to find?   My theory is that parents die, their kids find that special envelope of images, and it's "Oh my God!  It's naked mom.  Why is dad wearing that designer dress?  They're doing what?"  Those photos don't end up in the family archive, they get, quickly, fed into the shredder.  From my stand point, that's a terrible thing.

Selling Patriotism

It's a coincidence that I started this men in uniform series right before Memorial Day and it's a coincidence that I'm ending it on Memorial Day.  I'm tired of perpetual war, and not inclined to celebrate conflict.  If Memorial Day was a true day of remembrance, that would be one thing.  But mostly it's a self glorification of military strength. First it was World War 2, a necessary war, then the cold war, with a couple of hot chapters (Korea and Vietnam) thrown in.  Grenada, multiple Gulf wars and now the war on terror.  I'm sick of it and wish someone would stand up and say enough is enough.

Now that my rant is over, it's time to move on to a major pet peeve of mine.  Selling product by selling patriotism.  I especially hate the wounded warriors showing up in advertising.  Buy this truck, it's strong like this guy who was unlucky enough to be hit by an IED.  Just disgusting.  Of course, if the economy wasn't being looted by the Wall Street crowd, maybe lower middle class and poor kids wouldn't have to join the military, and then they wouldn't get  wounded and show up in ads.  

Medic, The Army Doctor

I had to use my best magnifying glass on this real photo postcard to make out the Caduceus on this soldiers collar.  The Caduceus (Actually it's a rod of Asclepius, but since everyone thinks Caduceus, I'm stickin' with that.) is the modern symbol for a doctor.  I always have to wonder how prepared a doctor is for war.  In the United States, before World War 1, a doctor might have had to deal with everything from a baby born in a tenement apartment, to polio, to streetcar accidents.  And then World War 1 comes along, and it's machine gun fire,  high explosives, and poison gas.  And as a bonus, as the war ends, the Spanish flu pandemic begins.  And for those who make light of the flu, the official death toll, at the time, was 30 million dead world wide, over 18 months.  Many modern historians, however, believe that the actual numbers were somewhere between 100 and 120 million dead.

Fort Howard

And so we continue with the men in uniform series, today going a bit back in time from the last post, to the World War 1 era.  Written on the back, "Baltimore, Maryland, Fort Howard."  Fort Howard started out as an unnamed coast artillery battery, built in 1896,  at North Point, in Baltimore County.  One would think that in 1896 the United States would have little fear from a naval attack, but we had just gone through a crisis with the nation of Chili.  And no, it's not as silly as it sounds.  In the 1890s, Chili had the largest navy in the Pacific and was thought  a formidable threat to our security.  More so on the west coast, but still, the Chesapeake is the gateway to Washington, D.C.  In 1902, Theodore Roosevelt's Secretary of War, Elihu Root renamed the battery, Fort Howard, after Revolutionary War general, John Edgar Howard.  In 1940, Fort Howard was closed and the property was turned over to The Veteran's Administration.  In 1975, the portions of the property that contained the original battery was turned over to Baltimore County for use as a park.  The rest of the property is still owned and used by The Department of Veteran's Affairs.  And if anyone cares about our dispute with Chili, I'd suggest looking up the Baltimore incident, which had nothing to do with the city of Baltimore.

Home On Leave

This one's dated "Mar 44."  D-Day was a few months away, and victory a little more than a year.  If this young man was a new recruit, he was probably on leave before being sent to a replacement camp, perhaps Camp Croft, mentioned in yesterday's post.

To me, though, it's his grandfather (Or perhaps great-grandfather.) that draws my eye.  I'm trying to figure out just how old he could have been when this picture was taken.  If he was eighty, he was born in the last year of the Civil War, had lived to see the Spanish-American War, World War 1, as well as all the Indian wars of the great plains.  And judging by the background, more than likely, he  witnessed some of those battles.  And then there was the invention of the light bulb, movies, radio, and the airplane.  The dust bowl and the great depression.  And if he lived a few years after this photo was taken, atomic weaponry, and jet aircraft.  May you live in interesting times.

Camp Croft

I wrote in my last post that photographs of men in uniform were quite common and that I had a lot in the collection.  In the next three or four posts I'm going to put up a few of the ones that have yet to see the light of day.

This print was once pasted to something, and when it was removed from that backing things got a bit damaged.  There is a stamp on the back, but it's only partly readable, but enough is  there that I was able to figure out that this photo was taken by E.A. Beeks from Spartanburg, South Carolina.  Well, the man in this photo looks to be from the World war 2 era, so a quick search, and I found out that there was an army infantry replacement camp just outside Spartanburg.  Camp Croft was open from 1940 to 1946, and as the name implies, soldiers were sent there and waited to be shipped out to replace combat casualties.  A lot of men passed through Camp Croft.  Some of them went on to fame in civilian life, including Nelson Riddle, Hoyt Wilhelm, Zero Mostel, Henry Kissinger, Alan Cranston, and Spiro T. Agnew.