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Kodachrome
There are only two things I know for sure about this picture. According to the calendar on the wall, it was taken in December of 1957. And I found it in the collection of Kodachrome slides that I scanned after my Aunt died a few years ago.
I have one educated guess – it was taken during a hunting trip in northern (?) Wisconsin, presumably by my uncle who died more than 25 years ago.
I have one piece of negative information. I showed it to my cousins the other day and they don’t recognize anyone in it. Also, I didn’t find any obviously related images in the collection. It’s literally a one-off snapshot of a moment in time.
But I think it’s a fascinating photograph. The color pops out at you. It’s almost 64 years old, but the detail is so clear it’s almost like standing in the corner of the bar. There are shots and beers, a couple of dollar bills, and silver coins scattered on the bar. A hamburger costs 25 cents, but there’s no food around. Everybody is smiling, some more broadly than others – maybe a couple of locals joining the city folk after the hunt?
There are stories to be told here.
Do you have any pictures like this in your own collections?
Published in General
Love the picture, Miffed.
Beautiful.
May I recommend that you open an account on ancestry.org or http://www.familysearch.org, and start saving those images for posterity? You create a profile for yourself which will not be visible to anyone until after your demise (may that be many decades from now). Next create profiles for your parents, grand-parents, etc. Anyone who has been deceased for more than a certain amount of time (I don’t remember how long) becomes visible to other users. Add the photos as part of their profile. For the photos like the one you show, put them in the profile of each of that generation of your family. You will eventually link into existing profiles for your ancestors. Those links will allow others users of the sites doing family research to find their way to the photos. They may be able to identify who is in them. I believe that ancestry.com is a private organization and costs money. familysearch.org is run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and is free to use. There is something amazing about coming across photos of family held by long-lost relatives that they make available on these websites.
They still had separate bathrooms depending on your sex. That is becoming more and more unique these days.
You probably don’t remember not having cousins. My parents were both only children, hence no cousins. I’m a bit jealous. Great picture.
Don’t be. I have lots of cousins one of whom is poison. He has created so many fights in the family and then cleaned up. Maybe out is the right word. He’s a lawyer.
All mine are fine people. Even the
CommunistProgressive.“Also use as a walking harness. For… 10-year-olds.”
Mine is a Republican.
I wish I had a December 1957 photo of the inside of my grandfather’s country store, but I don’t. This one is from almost five years later, on September 12, 1962.
I’m not in the photo, but a younger brother and my baby sister are in it, and also my mother and both of my grandfathers.
I still remember the smells and every creaky floorboard in the place, as well as the feel of the front storm door, and the arrangement of everything in the rooms in the back in my grandfather’s living quarters. Go up the step into the little entrance hall on the left, turn right into the kitchen, and then left again to the door into the living room. Next to the door hung my grandfather’s razor strop and a little wash basin where he used a straight razor to shave. (I have that razor in my possession.) In the living room, just on the other side of the unpainted wooden wall in the entryway, was an out-of-tune upright piano where my grandfather would play some of his favorite church hymns (a small repertoire), his right foot hard on the sustain pedal from beginning to end.
Standing against the shelves just under the breakfast cereal is a fork gizmo that was used to grab boxes from the high shelves. I think I also see the string coming down from a spool that was used to tie packages in brown paper. I’m trying to remember now if the trap door to the cellar was behind or just in front of the counter. Wooden cases of soda pop where kept down there.
Behind my mother were cases of candy and soda pop. I don’t remember any fresh meat being sold there, but I’m not sure. There were frozen TV dinners. Grandpa did have chest freezers in the store, one of which we hauled home to our place in Minnesota in 1974 when he was shutting the place down. I don’t know that the place would have passed a sanitary inspection in the 1960s, as there was no indoor plumbing. However, I’ve found a state inspection report from the late 1910s, in the very early days of such inspections in North Dakota, in which it did pass inspection. There were two general stores in the village at that time, and IIRC the other one didn’t get such a good report. I have been told that back in those days, Grandpa’s living room was a pool room, and that it was a lively place.
To the right and behind the photographer were a lot of miscellaneous farm hardware items. Ten years earlier the shelves to the left and behind the photographer had clothing and dry goods, and there had also been a toy section, which was always the first place I’d head when I was a little tyke. But the toy section was long gone by 1962, and maybe the dry goods were gone by then, too. I’m not sure.
It wasn’t too long after this photo was taken that a Minuteman missile site was constructed about a mile north of the store. It was part of Wing 3 based at Minot AFB. The construction workers would buy cigarettes, candy, and soda pop at the store, and kept the place going for a couple of years. I don’t think Grandpa ever had any kind of liquor license, or that he even sold beer, although I wouldn’t have given it much thought if he had. He was a licensed gun dealer, but never had any guns on display.
Everyone is looking rather somber, perhaps because we were there for a funeral. Actually, we had thought we were going to North Dakota for my grandfather’s funeral, and it was only when we got there and thought we should stop at the store, just because, that we were surprised to see him come out back to water his trees. We couldn’t have been happier to see him. It was his younger brother who had died, and this photo was probably taken after the funeral.
I’ve always told the story of that episode in the context of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Before we left home in Nebraska, there was some question as to whether we should even travel in the midst of the crisis, but we quickly decided we needed to go anyway. That raises a question, though. The date on the photo is September 12, 1962. Grandpa’s brother had died on September 5. (He lived alone and his body wasn’t found until a couple of days later.) And as everyone knows, the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred in October, 1962. So how can that be reconciled with my memories?
I went to newspapers.com and found a front-page newspaper story from September 5 in which members of Congress were already referring to a crisis situation in Cuba. It’s not exactly the story told in all the Kennedy hagiographies of a president springing to action when the U-2 overflights revealed offensive missile sites in Cuba. As the fact-checkers would now say, the story that is usually told is missing context. In early September Kennedy was saying that all the weapon placements were defensive in nature, but it seems not everyone in Congress was buying it at that time. My parents would certainly have been among the people who would have been quick to assume the worst of the Soviets.
I wish the Omaha World-Herald was one of the papers that I had access to with my newspapers.com subscription, as that was the newspaper we subscribed to. It was a rather conservative newspaper in those days. That might give me more of an idea of what information we were acting on. There might also have been discussion of the Cuba situation on right-wing talk radio of the day. (Very different from what we call talk radio now.)
Whatever happened regarding Cuba after we returned from that trip to North Dakota in September 1962 (when I had just started high-school) may have seemed anti-climactic to me. I was happy that my grandfather was still alive. I still miss him every day.
My grandfather was one of twelve children – eight brothers and four sisters. When I was about 9 or 10, I looked at this old family picture of him with his brothers and sisters, all twelve of them. I noticed a couple of Xs over two faces. I asked him about it, and he said, “They are no longer with us.”
As I grew older, the number of Xs grew until he became one of them. I was 12 . . .
Zooming in on the photo, I see the spool of wrapping string on the top shelf, next to the breakfast cereals. So that much be an electrical extension cord or some such that’s coming down from the ceiling.
The 50s and 80s are the two decades the left/media/Hollywood absolutely hate with a burning passion. Isn’t that strange ? Peace and prosperity , they hate it.
Even forty years ago, people noticed how the two decades had a kinship. The success of Back to the Future was largely based on that. It’s not peace and prosperity that they hated, but the humiliation of being rejected by the country they thought they had in the bag. “But, but, the New Deal! We ended the Depression for you, and you’re ungrateful!” “But, but, the Civil Rights and women’s movements! By giving up in Vietnam, we got us out of there! Aren’t you thankful?”
What are yall doing on my couch!
I’m thankful that I didn’t get my ass shot off in Vietnam.
I used Kodachrome for decades because of it’s beautiful colors. It had to be mailed off to Kodak for processing (the pre-addressed mailbag came with it), which meant photos taken might not be seen for many weeks if they were shot while deployed at sea or while traveling deep in the third world with no return address. There was also the possibility the processed slides would never be seen again after posting them.
I’m very interested to know how you got such a good scan of this old slide, @MiffedWhiteMale.
The one at the top of the post was scanned by a pro service, scancafe.com
The ones in comments #12 and #14 were done by me on a canon flatbed scanner (
canoscan 4300, If I remember correctly.I did not remember correctly: Canoscan 8400. It died some years ago).I bought a Nikon Coolscan film scanner for doing my negatives after I finished scanning a couple thousand slides on the flatbed, when I realized the results for negatives on the flatbed were sub-optimal.
By the time I was doing masses of scans after my Aunt died, I decided my time was worth more than the cost of paying for a box of stuff to be done. That, plus my cousins paid for it…
I did have friends come to me and ask me to scan stuff for them, but I told them I couldn’t do them cheaply enough to be worth my time, they were better off with the service. @jro
Thanks! I also got a Nikon Coolscan years ago, but haven’t been dedicated enough to invest the required effort and time to do thousands of slides. I’ll give scancafe a try.
From what I saw on ebay and other internet sites a few months ago, my used Coolscan V is worth more now used then I paid for it new.
I might wander over to my late mother’s side of the house and dig out the old photo albums. There might be something interesting things to scan and upload (probably a separate post) . . .