The Army Hospital Album 13

Finally, an actual medical procedure.  In picture number four, some blood is being taken.  But what about the first picture?  Am I wrong?  Is that guy making a rug?  And, you'll have to take my word for it.  I needed my best magnifying glass to make it out.  The guy in the second photo is reading a story called The Coffee Cup Showdown.

As usual, click on army hospital collection in labels to bring up the lot.

The Army Hospital Album 12

It must have been boring in the army hospital.  For those unaware, the military was segregated before 1948.  Click on army hospital collection in the labels section to bring up the lot.

The Army Hospital Album 11

I'll be finishing out the year with  more images from The Army Hospital Collection.  We've got  more dates with this lot.  The scrabble players and the two nurses, "MAY 55"  I keep wondering if being in a military hospital is an open ended thing.  If a soldier's enlistment is over, but he's still considered too ill for service, what happens?  Continued enlistment until recovery? Release to a VA facility?  Just plain release, left to their own devices?  And of course, what would have happened in 1955, compared to today?

Click on army hospital collection in the labels section to bring up everything.  Lots more to come.

Little Tom

I can't promise to lay off the real photo postcards, but I can say that I'll be moving on to more recently purchased images after this one.  Like the last three posts, this one goes back to my earliest days of collecting.  So, let's say I picked it up around forty or so years ago.  But who was little Tom?  On the front of the card, he's Tom Caromin (I think).  On the back, he's Thomas W. G. Cameron.

Aunt Grace

This is what comes from rummaging around in old boxes.  Written on the back of this real photo postcard, "Aunt Grace Brown age 82 & 6 months birthday Feb. 3, (83) 1939 (!938) for Mrs. Minnie Currie"  Anyway, when I collected this image, around forty years ago, I wasn't too careful about the filing system.  Click on Currie family in the labels section at the bottom of the post and see the pictures it should have been published with.  Actually, I think there is at least one more Currie post, but the name isn't in the title and I'm not scrolling back through the whole blog looking for it.

Porch Post

Well, this is a bit frustrating.  Like my last post, this real photo postcard goes back to my early days of collecting.  I suspect the two posts might be from the same source, but I didn't keep track of things like that back then, so we'll never know.

A Sunday Best Portrait

Believe it or not, I've got four copies of this real photo postcard in my collection, and they've all got that ghosted affect.  My best guess is that the film was loaded incorrectly in the camera, with the focal plane just a bit off.  For non film people, that means that the film was buckled in some way, and part of it was further form the lens than it should have been.

This image is one of the first pictures I ever bought.  I've had it in my collection for around fifty years, give or take.  All I can remember is that I picked it up in western Pennsylvania.

Side View

My guess is, somewhere in the World War 1 era.

School Days

Yes, it's one of those school photos.  Do kids still troop off to the cafeteria once a year for these?  I keep thinking that school photos must be a disappearing ritual.

S.F., The Travelers Collection

Yesterday's post was a collection of true mystery locales.  Today, it's San Francisco.  Well, at least the top one.  Alcatraz can be seen out in the bay, but what I really like about this image is, it's still working class San Francisco.  It's hard to believe for anyone who has spent any time in dot.com, upscale, chichi San Fran, but the city by the bay was once the hot spot for west coast,  left wing labor politics.  Artists lived there because it was cheap.  North Beach was inexpensive Italian restaurants, and the beats at City Lights Books.

The first time I visited San Francisco, over thirty years ago, I can remember eating at this bay side cafe.  As a former member of the Laborers and United Mine Workers, I felt quite comfortable eating with the stevedores and commercial fishermen.  The last time I was in San Francisco, about a decade ago, I went to the same cafe.  How things had changed.  It was all upscale hipster types waiting for brunch.  Brunch at a working class eatery!  I might not be remembering correctly.  It's been a long time, but Eagle Grill sounds right.

I'm not sure about the second photo, but it looks familiar, and I think it's San Francisco.  If anyone can confirm that, please leave a comment.

Click on travelers collection in the labels section to bring up the lot.  I'll be leaving the collection for awhile after this one.  More in the weeks and months to come.

More Mystery Spots, The Travelers Collection

This small collection has a fair number of mystery location snapshots.  The top one looks like it's from somewhere in the northwest United States.  I've traveled enough around the region and have seen more than a few dams that look similar.  The second, an aerial shot, with cliffs in the foreground. (Or taken from a mountain top with rocks at the photographer's feet.)   Haven't a clue.  Number three is the only one with any info, and that's just a date.  "JAN 55"  The month and year I was born.  And the final, the ruins....I keep thinking England, but I've seen similar shells in central New York.

Click on travelers collection in labels at the bottom of the post to bring up the rest.

On the Boardwalk, The Travelers Collection

Another snapshot from the travelling family collection.  On the Boardwalk, but which one?  My guess is Atlantic City, and I have absolutely no idea why.  Anyway, the white, double-breasted, linen suit isn't something you'd see in our day.  Very stylish.

Click on travelers collection in the labels at the bottom of the post to bring up the rest of the collection.

Sneaking Up On Mom and Dad

It looks like she just might pull it off.  Written on the back, "Lake Geneva July 4, 31"  Lake Geneva is a town in southern Wisconsin near the Illinois border.

Father Knew Best So He Left It To Beaver

If you're old enough, and I am, you'll remember TV shows like Leave It To Beaver, Father Knows Best and The Donna Reed Show.  Each one had a stay at home mom who always wore a dress, high heels, and pearls.  Not the best outfit for house cleaning.  The Hollywood fantasy.  After the photo lab I worked at went out of business, I started doing background work in the movies.  The celluloid  fantasy world is still going strong.  A movie set is the only place in the world where women are always stylishly dressed.

Okay, I've got a question that no one can answer. (Probably)  What do  pictures on this blog look like?  Saturday, just fifteen minutes or so after I posted some stuff on Fair Use, one of my other blogs, the monitor went kablooey.  There I was, just sitting there, minding my own business, when my old CRT screen went, first all silvery, wavy lines, then black.  The poor thing, first purchased in 1997, went to the great computer E-waste bin in the sky.  It took me a couple of days of looking, but finally I found an almost new LCD monitor that I could actually afford.  No mean feat on my income.  To make a long story short, I was very disappointed after I plugged it in.  Every image on this blog was all faded and washed out.  When I noticed that the images looked alright when I stood up and kind of looked down, I tilted the thing up, and now I'm quite happy.  Anyway, I got to thinking, what do people in blog world actually see?  All those monitors, some that work well,and some that barely function, must present a lot of variation.   I never thought about it before, but most viewers won't see what I see.

Just For the Hell Of It

Just for the hell of it, I thought I'd try a different approach.  In my collecting, I pick up all sorts of old photos,  some of which are rather faded.  I've noticed something new in my additions to this blog in the past month or so.  The more faded the photo, the darker it uploads.  Just for the hell of it, I converted the very faded, brownish print I uploaded in my last post, to a greyscale.  A fancy way of saying, I got rid of the brown when I scanned the photo to my hard drive.  Sadly, it made not a whit of difference when I posted it to the blog.  I guess the tech boys at Blogger did what the tech boys do. They changed things.  In this case, a bit of auto correct, with no means of over riding what, in my case, is neither needed or wanted.  Oh well, I'm not happy, but what can you do.

Marblehead

What is wrong with blogger?  The original print is very, very light.  Washed out, and ghosted back.  That's the way the scan looks on my computer, and then when I add it to the blog, it's all this muddy brown.  Frustrating, because I have no idea what to do.

Anyway, labeled "G.H.S. Marblehead 1936"  I'm guessing that the H.S. in G. H. S. stands for high school.  I went to the Marblehead, Massachusetts city website, and looked up schools.  No matches.  With a name like Marblehead, one would expect some sort of mountain redoubt of a town.  Actually, it's a coastal town with a history that revolves around the sea.  Fishing, and now yachting.  Oh those rich people.

The Army Hospital Album 10

I still think this is a psychiatric hospital, but if so, why the surgical mask?  The first two photos are dated "APR 55"

 I wish I could make out the title of the book in the first image.  About twenty years ago, I was wandering around the California desert,  dropped into a thrift shop, and found a large stash of  sleazy 1950s paperbacks.  The type of books with lurid, illustrated, covers, and sex on every other page.  The thrift store guy told me they had all come from a library on an army base, which wasn't all that surprising.  What was surprising was that there were both gay themed books, and books about cross dressing.  I bought them all for 50 cents each, and put them on EBay with a five buck starting bid.  I paid my rent for year on that find.  I sold one of the cross dressing books for $285.  Go figure.

I'll be leaving this collection behind for the next three or four weeks.  Click on army hospital collection in the labels section at the bottom of the post to bring up the whole lot.