SLIDE CAMERA
Backwoods Blog;
in the woods and on the road…
One of the valued keepsakes in the family attic is my father’s gray metal storage box of slides that he took years ago in his picture-taking days. From what I can tell, it was a short phase of about four years from 1949-1952 when he was an avid photographer (slides only). My mother had a Polaroid Land camera in the early 1960s and also took slides until 1970, but never with my father’s camera. So I’m currently going through all the old slides and converting a select number to digital for long-term storage. The slide in this post is the view from the Hutchinson kitchen window looking up the hill heading towards Houlton. The view has not changed much in the past seventy years, although the white picket fence is long gone. Most of the photographs I’ve used for this writer’s blog are those of my father’s or from the childhood slides my mother took.
I took a B&W photography and darkroom class back in college and since I didn’t have a camera I asked Dad if I could borrow his (which hadn’t been used in over thirty years!). The camera became an interesting conversation starter in the class and even though it lacked many of the modern features it still took damn good pictures. I eventually up-graded to a manual 35mm in the 1980s, and I hate to admit it, but these days I don’t even own a camera – my iPhone 12 Pro Max is all I use. What has the world come to?
A couple of years ago I had a curious dream; it was about this same time of year, the waning days of March leading up to Easter and the snows were gradually receding from the fields. In my dream was the same view you see in today’s slide image, only with slightly less snow. But I knew something was amiss (perhaps this is a dream?) when I noticed palm trees in the open field leading up the hill. It was the only color in a black and white dream, and I must say, it left a striking image in my mind. Perhaps we are all a bit color-starved this time of year waiting for the first green and blooming of flowers that are surely on their way.
In the woods,
Dave
March 30, 2022
As usual, David, your remarks triggered a couple of things for me, disparate things today. First, looking up the road on Route 1 south, I can only think of Norma Folsom, Garth’s wife. As you know, they lived in a ranch house on the right in your picture, hidden by the other homes and both have passed away. Norma worked at the Department of Health and Welfare when I arrived in 1971. Her first profession had been nursing and she gave me my allergy shots for years, sent up from Portland by Dr. Zolov. I enjoyed those shots because they always included a bit of Downeast wit or wisdom. Norma grew up in Machias. “No dog bites me twice and lives.” “It’s thick a’ fog down ta tha hahbah.” She had a story about her father, who was then in his nineties. She went down to Machias to visit and went for a ride with him. As they were driving he let on that his car’s brakes weren’t working. Norma was aghast. In response to her concern, “Dad” said, “Norm, you don’t need brakes if you know how to steeah.”
The other trigger was the old Argus camera. During our courtship, I bought Martha a pawn-shop Ricoh (I think) 35 mm camera (not SLR). The lens closed up and when you clicked a latch, the lens, complete with cloth bellows, came gliding out into position. We took some great pictures with it including a wintery field of small, ghostly pines covered with ice after a relatively warm January freezing rainstorm. Over the years, the bellows developed pinholes in them, which allowed extraneous light into the camera and created some strange pictures. I tried to find the model on eBay, but apparently it was so old that nobody is selling it today. It took Martha a few years to find out what that pawn-shop Ricoh should have warned her about my thriftiness.
Based on the picture it looks like a Post-War Argus A2B manufactured between 1945-1950.
An interesting story how the man responsible for the Argus camera company originally manufactured radios, but due to plummeting summer sales needed “to keep his factory and salesmen working all year… (so he) searched for a product that could be cheaply manufactured and sold during the warmer half of the year.”
http://theargusa.com/History.htm
Thanks for the adept research, Garrett. I’ll check out the link…