Views from Crestmont Drive

In the past couple weeks I’ve been looking through metal boxes and plastic carousels and mail order packages of the slides I inherited from my father 10 years ago, and have the following thoughts.

In my father’s days — and up until the past 10 or 15 years of digital cameras and smartphones — people took photos very carefully, sparingly, and then got them all developed, because there was no alternative. These days you can take dozens of digital pics and edit them at your leisure, never having to print them out, and the wastage doesn’t cost you anything.

As for the photos themselves: landscape pictures are worthless 40 years later. There was a time, in those days, when vacationers would return home and invite friends over for ‘slide shows’ to show off all of the fantastic places they had been to, since their friends had not likely been there themselves.

And here is something of a revelation I’ve had. I’ve always rather disdained those tourists who insist on taking picture of *themselves* in front of every possible landmark. [Especially Asian tourists, including Yeong’s family, when they visited the US just over a year ago.] To some extent it strikes me as egotistic — as if the place only matters because *you* were there — and to some extent it’s bothered me because the compulsion to snap pics overrides the in-the-moment experience of actually being in the place that you are. This latter reason is why I stopped taking photos on trips, with only a few exceptions. I’d rather enjoy the moment, than be preoccupied with trying to record it.

But: I now realize the pics of tourists themselves, with landmarks in the background, will be more meaningful in future decades than bare pics of those landmarks would be. Because, as I scan through my father’s endless landscape pics of the Great Smokey Mountains, or Rocky Mountain National Park (destinations of family camping trips, when I was a teenager), it’s only those pics that show family members, or our car or our campsite, that I am tempted to scan and keep digitally. Landscape pics, anyone can find online these days.

Update Sunday 25 May: another crucial point I forget when posting the other day. The vast majority of my father’s pics *are not labeled*. This isn’t so bad for those landscape pics — but for family pics, especially of older relatives, it’s frustrating to have no idea who the people are in many of those photos from the ’50s or before, or any way now of finding out.

I compiled several albums of print photos in the ’70s and ’80s, some of friends and family, some of trips I took, before I transitioned to digital photos in the ’90s, photos stored in various directories on my harddrive. While I did carefully label the photos in those print albums, I admit I haven’t done so for the digital files. I suppose one assumes, or realizes, that most personal photos will be of no interest to anyone, after oneself is gone. This isn’t necessarily true, which is why I’m currently taking the effort to mine my father’s pics, and to some extent my own, as a legacy for my own various branches of family, just in case they are ever interested.

When my father died in 2001, I acquired his boxes of slides. The earliest were in three or four metal boxes with rows of slots that would hold two slides each. These were mostly taken from my early childhood and before – many of them early family pics from before I was born, of relatives I never met. Some of them are of road trips my parents took in England, when I was a babe. Some are from later back in the US, where we settled in Apple Valley, the high desert northeast of Los Angeles. Many of these I recall seeing as I was growing up, in evening ‘slide shows’, when we would set up the slide projector to look at them, projected on a portable screen, sometimes for ourselves, sometimes for visiting friends. (There was a social cliché for a while, perhaps now obsolete, about boring your friend with slides from your latest vacation.)

It turns out there are more than those three or four boxes of slides. There are several ‘carousels’ of slides that were taken later than those in the metal boxes. (One of Don Draper’s moments of genius, according to an early episode of Man Men, was coming up with the word ‘carousel’ to describe what before were termed merely ‘wheels’.) I haven’t looked these carefully, because the carousel projector itself is malfunctioning; the carousel doesn’t advance in order to move to the next slide automatically. Which means I will have to manually take the slides out the carousel and either insert them directly into the projector one at a time, or look at them via the slide sorter that I fortunately acquired along with all the pics. (It’s a big square plastic tray, illuminated from behind by a light bulb, mounted upright at an angle with ledges to place the slides on. Enough ledges to look at 20 or 30 slides at a time.)

Most of these slides were I think from trips my family took after I’d moved out and was living on my own, and they’d moved from Los Angeles back east to Tennessee.

There are also, I hadn’t appreciated until now, lots of loose boxes of developed slides (little boxes that hold 10 or 12 slides in two stacks each), that were never loaded into metal boxes or carousels, and mostly slides that I’ve never seen, I am discovering. Some are from events after I’d moved out… but some are from years before. My college grad pics! Alas, many of them are faded and completely reddish… though amazingly, some older slides, of my brother and sisters in the early ‘60s, still have full color.

Again before moving on, let me mine my own photo albums for relevant print photos. As I said in the first installment of this personal history, I visited England for the first time (since my birth) in 1990, and made a point of renting a car (driving on the left!), and drove from London out to Felixstowe and that area to see what it was like. As I said, it looked pretty much identical to my father’s slides from nearly 40 years before. I have yet to mine his slides, but for now I’ll scan and post a few photos from my album.

For this first set of scanned photos from my own photo albums, I’ll save larger scans at 1000 pixels wide, and ‘thumbnails’ for display here at 500px wide. Click on the displayed images for the larger ones.

First: here’s the house where my parents lived in Felixstowe, England: 10 Bath Road. First a street view:

Then a front view:

Here’s a view of the pebble beach (what they call a ‘strand’?)

And then a pic of the grassy strip just above the beach, with those strings of lights. In the distance are the gantries of Felixstowe harbor.

The town sits on a bluff somewhat above the beach; here is a section of garden just above beach level, at the base of the bluff.

And here’s a section of downtown, very quiet on a Sunday morning.

Then, a shot looking out over the North Sea. It must have been morning, since the view must have been the northeast.

Two more. Driving north from Felixstowe, here is the entrance to R.A.F. (Royal Air Forcebase) Woodbridge, where my father worked as a weatherman in the early/mid 1950s.

And then, Phyllis Memorial Home, my birthplace, looking unchanged since 1955.

A bit more family history, as far as I can recall it, before I get to my personal memories of growing up in the high desert, and how that affected me.

In Felixstowe [England, where I was born], the family friend was a neighbor woman named Ruby. (When I delve into my half dozen metal boxes of family slides, I think I will find photos or her, and us at that time.) And one of the stories I remember [again: in a crucial sense, everything we remember about our past are stories, told over and over again in our minds or whenever we relate them to others, and not necessarily reliable as actual history — but nevertheless meaningful, as meaningful as anything from our past can be] is that my mother would leave me outside in a pram during the day, despite the weather being (since we were right on the coast) cool and damp. I have always attributed this to my relative tolerance of cool weather. I am the last one to put on a coat. In the mild SoCal weather, I can go a whole year without putting on a coat. (At the same time, given my high desert experience, I withstand dry heat easily as well. It’s hot humidity I have difficulty with.)

Thinking back, I think my father was not completely out of the Air Force when my family returned to the US. This was when I was about 1 ½ years old I’ve been told; late 1956 or early 1957. The reason we settled in Apple Valley (despite the name, a rather desolate desert town 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles) is that it was near George Air Force Base, just west of the larger town of Victorville, CA. (The base was decommissioned in 1992.) I think my father must have finished his Air Force commission there, and chosen to return there (as opposed to someplace in the Midwest, where he grew up) since it was relatively near the friend he’d met in the service, Rollin Bigbee, who lived in Burbank.

Let’s do a map. I’ve always been obsessed with maps, knowing where I am, knowing where places are. It’s common for me, reading a book, to check the atlas (I have several) or, these days, Google, to see where these places are. So, where is Apple Valley? It’s northeast of Los Angeles, thus:
(Click on the image for a larger one.)

Apple Valley is in the upper right, near Victorville and Hesperia. The big green bands between there and Los Angeles below are the San Gabriel Mountains, with Big Bear Lake, Mt Baldy, the Angeles Crest Highway, and more. The world to the north is utterly different from the world to the south. It is an area of sand and rocky hills and vast expanses, at an elevation of roughly 3000 feet. The western end of that desert, between Victorville and Palmdale, is the area the rock band U2 took as the setting for their 1986 album “The Joshua Tree” – which included the song “Where the Streets Have No Names”. (This is true: all the roads out across the desert there have designations like Avenue F, or 152nd St east. No names.)

So: I believe my father finished out his Air Force commission at George Air Force Base. Then he got a job as a draftsman, for a man named John Blesch, who had an office in the area of Apple Valley called ‘the village’, about midway along the stretch of Highway 18 that runs straight west-east, in what is actually the southeastern end of the valley.

At first, we lived in what must have been a rented house, in the northeast corner of the valley, out by Fairview Mountain – a cinderblock house, and this is the place where I have my earliest memories… of lying in a crib with my parents in the other room; of a dog called Tammy running up the driveway. Everything was sand and scrub brush, alongside rocky hills.

In a pattern that was to be repeated, we moved from a rented house into a house that we bought: on Winnebago Road, to the southwest of the rented house and just north of what was then the small Apple Valley airport. This is the house where I lived for four years or so, through kindergarten and the 1st grade, and where later my maternal grandmother lived into her 80s. My family visited her many times over the years, and after they moved back east, I visited her over the years, until her death in 1984. My long-time connection to this place is why I list it as my hometown on Facebook. I have many pics, which I will scan and post eventually.

But a little bit more family background. My mother had one brother, Robert (my ‘Uncle Bob’), who I think must have also been in the service at some point, though I don’t think I ever knew the details, and who settled in the Los Angeles suburbs (the San Fernando Valley) afterwards. Because both he and my mother’s family settled in southern California, my grandmother on that side, who’d previously lived her entire life in a small northwestern Illinois town, relocated to southern California herself. For a time she lived in an apartment in Costa Mesa, down in Orange County. To get just a bit ahead of my personal timeline: when my own family moved from Apple Valley down to Santa Monica, when I was in 1st or 2nd grade, my grandmother moved in with us, in an apartment that was adjacent to the garage at the back of the property along the alley. And when, after 6 months, my father gave up that Santa Monica rental and bought a house in the San Fernando Valley… my grandmother moved out to Apple Valley, to take possession of the house my father had not been able to sell.

End of part 2.