1940s

All American

Last New York photo from my father’s collection of Kodachrome slides (story in this earlier post). This one was a real treat for me and turns out not to have been taken by my father at all and not even to have been taken in the 1950s but in the mid-1940s and not to have been taken in NYC but in Carmel, New York where my maternal grandparents had a house. It is a picture of my grandparents when still way younger than I ever knew them, in front of the house, with their friend (or cousin?) Tilly (on the left) and her dog, Mr. Chips. Above them on the porch, my mother salutes the unknown photographer (Tilly’s husband?) beside the flag. There were a few versions of this and the slides were unbelievably schmutzig, requiring so much retouching that it slowed down my computer.

In Memorium

20111218-Dad's Class — North London (Golders Green?)

My father would have been 78 last week. Here are 2 photos he scanned a few years ago. The first is his elementary school class, somewhere in North London, probably around 1941. I’m not even certain which boy he is, though I suspect the boy all the way on the right in the middle row. The next image is of his mother (center) and her sisters my great-aunts Ella (left, I think) and Nancy. I met Ella a couple of times, once in the early ’70s and again in the mid-’80s when I lived in London. I never met my grandmother, Annie, or Aunt Nancy.