Not the kind you ride down. The 35mm kind. My dad loved to take pictures, and he preferred slides to prints. When I was out in Tennessee for his funeral I was given five cases full of his slides with the agreement that I would scan them and upload them for anyone who wanted to see them. The slide scanner I bought through Amazon arrived today and I took it for a spin with a couple of random boxes. I uploaded the results to my SmugMug gallery.
This weekend I hope to have the time to start scanning more, starting with the oldest slides I can find. Anything not for the public will be put in hidden galleries, but everything else will be available to browse. One thing about my dad; he LOVED to travel. There will be photos that were taken all over Europe in the sixties… possibly older. It’s going to be fun. I just wish he was still around to tell us about them.
When I was a kid I DREADED my dad breaking out the slide projector. Now I would give ten years off my own life for one more year to be able to sit with him and talk about his life and his adventures.
One story I’ll never forget is how, when he was stationed in Turkey, he had a molar that was hurting him something fierce. As he told it, the base dentist was a butcher and there was no place off base that he could go to have the tooth extracted, so he did what he had to do. He got liquored up, took a pair of pliers and extracted his own tooth…
I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you for the last 18 years dad. This project won’t make up for that, but at least something you created will be out there for the world to see.