Posted on 09/28/2008 6:48:37 AM PDT by nuconvert
Sliding down memory lane
(This classic Dave Barry column was originally published April 13, 2003.)
Recently, my little brother Phil (he's only 50) gave me a box that wound up with him some years ago, when our mom died and a bunch of family flotsam drifted down one generation.
The box contains slides. For you young digital readers, I should explain that slides are transparencies made from photographs. They used to be very popular. When you wanted to look at big, bright images of your vacation, you'd get out your slides, spend a few seconds thinking about what a pain it was to set up the projector and screen, then put your slides back away, unviewed. This saved a LOT of time. I'd forgotten about these slides. I took them 40 years ago, in March 1963 when I was 15, a sophomore at Pleasantville (N.Y.) High School. The slides are of a trip I took with a friend, Evan Thompson. Somehow, we persuaded our parents to let us spend our spring break on our own, in West Palm Beach, Fla.
You may be surprised that my parents -- who were not insane -- agreed to this plan. I mean, today, many parents are nervous about letting 15-year-olds go to SCHOOL, let alone on unchaperoned trips to a place 1,200 miles away. But that was an innocent era. Nobody had heard of Lee Harvey Oswald, or Vietnam or ''Celebrity Mole Hawaii.'' On TV, married people slept in separate beds and reproduced via mitosis.
I'm not saying we lived without worry.
(Excerpt) Read more at miamiherald.com ...
pong (it’s been a while, sorry)
Great column. My dad took thousands of slides in the 1950s that have mostly faded away now.
You can buy yourself a decent scanner for around $600 and scan them yourself. There’s a setting that I use to scan old slides called digital ROC- restoration of color. Since most labs charge from $1.50- $2.00 per scan, it may be worth the investment.
That’s wierd, the neat thing about slide transparancies is that they are fairly archival. I’ve got a whole bunch of my aunties slides from the 50s - taken with her Kodak model “B” - that are really nice, and the color saturation is amazing.
Barry is really a fine talent. It’s wonderful that he can write so charmingly and touchingly about something so inconsequential, the stuff of which real lives are made. There is a poignant affection for the boy he once was.
This is the funniest one!
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