Throwback Thursday - Anybody remember Pat Boone?

With most of my Throwback Thursday posts I try and relate it to people from the photographic community. However, this week's is all about family, printed images and great memories.  All of which I couldn't share with you, if right off the bat, I hadn't found the original print. A quick trip through the scanner and here it is.

This is where a few of you are going to roll your eyes, but the truth is, just handing people a jump drive with their digital files is NOT going to guarantee that 50+ years later, like I'm doing right now, anybody is going to have the technology to even look at the images. Yeah, I know, somebody out there is going to tell me that's absurd...but if it is, then explain why I can't play my eight tracks any more...find me a car manufactured today with a cassette deck...tell me what to do with the box of floppy discs I found the other day and the list goes on and on. 

If you're interested in ideas tied to providing prints to your clients check out the post I did a few weeks ago featuring an idea of Bryan Caporicci's and Michele Celentano's "I Believe". Bryan shared a great idea of how to use up those old floppy discs and Michele has given anybody who wants it, the rights to use her "I Believe" with clients.

Meanwhile, let's get back to my Throwback image and a quick run down Memory Lane...

Let's hit a few items in this picture. First of all, I found it in a box of old pictures already framed. Not sure when or why this one got saved, but it's me and my grandfather at the front door of our house in Ohio and I'm around eleven or twelve.

Pat Boone was the king, so pay attention to the white bucks.  The suit was actually a light blue - I think a seersucker. Catch the cigar in my grandfather's hand. Back then, just like today, my mother might have had a cigarette in the house, but nobody was getting away with a cigar. So, I'm assuming my grandfather was outside chasing a smoke break.

He went through a box of cigars a week. Then, one day at around age 70, he went cold turkey and just quit. He put all his cigar money in a jar and had enough a year later to take my grandmother on vacation to Mexico. The image was captured on a 35mm Agfa viewfinder that my Uncle got for my Dad in Europe.  It was our first real camera, with the best feature being the self-timer. 

My Dad shot very little black and white film, because everything back then was slides. At family gatherings he'd set up the projector and we'd look at slide after slide after slide after slide...are you catching a little pain in that memory? Actually it was fun most of the time, but every dozen or so slides, one would jam in the projector - we'd stop, turn the lights on, fix it and start again.

Hasselblad's Ernst Wildi used to say, "The difference between an amateur and a professional is that amateurs show you ALL of their shots!" Well, Dad couldn't have fit the profile of an amateur more and you'd think he won the lottery if he got 37 or 38 images out of a 36 exposure roll!

Last factoids on the list, it was around this time we discovered I was blind as a bat and needed glasses. Hey, if you've never had 20/20 vision, then you have no idea what you're missing. In this case I was 20/300. The other fun memory this brings out is this was my parent's first real house - a great little three bedroom ranch on a quiet wonderful street where a whole bunch of us would grow up together.

We rode bikes without helmets, put baseball cards on clothes pins in the spokes to make them sound cool, played army or cowboys and indians without thinking about being politically correct, smoked a cigarette behind somebody's garage now and then, burned leaves in piles at the edge of the yard every fall and in the winter time, somebody's dad would drive us around the neighborhood towing a line of sleds all tied together as we'd slip and slide on the ice.  Try doing any of these today and there's a good chance somebody is getting arrested!

All those memories out of just one 5x7 print!

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