Roar like a Lion!

ARRRRRRR!!!!

While looking for some software in an old desk drawer yesterday I came across a clutch of old family photos. Most were once jammed into something of a collage that hung near my mother’s bedroom dresser for many years. Calling it a collage gives it greater artistic intention than was ever intended. It was really just a dozen or so snapshots taped to a piece of cardboard and held in a flimsy frame by more tape and gravity. When my mother moved from her last apartment to assisted living about seven years ago the whole affair fell apart in my hands. The glass in the frame was long gone, the tape had lost its hold, and the edges of the photographs were dry and warped.

Most of the photos in that frame, like the one above, are yellowed from fifty years of exposure to the sunlight. (The right side of this photo holds its color better because it was covered in the frame by another photo all those years.) That any semblance of the original color remains in this photo at all is more a testament to the quality of even the most basic Kodak processing of that era than any attempt on my family’s part to preserve these images. I don’t know if it’s possible to restore the yellowed side of this photo. I might give it a try when I get a chance.

In the meantime, here I am in Virginia Beach at the Cavalier Beach Club in July of 1953, sixteen months old and full of myself, no doubt yelling at the ocean to stay in its place.

I’m still tilting at windmills.