fivecats journal

Stephe in Color
August 1978 Bethany Beach, DE
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My father emailed me a few weeks ago and wrote:

"We finally cleaned out the basement.  We went through all your boxes from Conn.  Value Village and the trash people got most of the goodies.  I still have two heavy boxes of items which you may want to look through.  I will get around to sending them to you one of these days. "

My initial reaction was, if I've lived without whatever-it-is for the past 15+ years I can probably still live without it.

Still, I kept quiet and decided I was kind of interested in what the mystery boxes might contain.

The first box arrived late last week. There were two pages taken out of the old family photo albums that had pictures from my tenth birthday that had David ("The Axeman") in them. There were only two good pictures of him, but they'll be scanned and sent to his family along with some memories about him that I've been planning on writing for a while.

There were also a collection of songbooks from when I was first learning to play the guitar. (The bulk of the weight in the box)

And then, at the bottom, were a handful of photographs that I'd printed back in high school. Beneath them the bottom of the box was filled with small containers of slides from some summer camps that I'd gone to in the late 70s.

Back in the late 70s I bought a Fuji ST-605, my first SLR and a great, albeit simple, camera. Manual focus, there was a button I pressed to get an internal light meter reading and I shot slides because they were cheaper than film to process. I took pictures like crazy, mostly informal portraits, until I heard a professional photographer say that he was lucky if he got one good shot out of an entire roll of film. I couldn't afford that kind of failure rate and slowly gave it up.

The camera was stolen years later. I didn't bother replacing it until we needed a decent camera for the jewelry business. By then digital had come around and one good shot out of a "roll" was extremely affordable.

From time to time I'm going to be horribly self-indulgent here and post some of those 25+ year old pictures. (Now I just need to find a decent slide scanner)

These first two pictures are of my friend Stephe. Back in the day Stephe was a wild thinker/schemer/planner who, amongst other things, ran for DC City Council, worked with me at The Kite Site in Georgetown and went off to NYC to The New School and was along for the famous Spanish Harlem ride (although, by his own account, he barely remembers it).

Today Stephe is a husband, father of two and an assistant professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. He's also been a profilic writer on technology subjects and is the creative force behind the radio show "What the Tech!" (Mentioned here despite the fact that I'm no longer asked to do technology reviews for them)

He's also been a great friend for many, many years.



Stephe in B&W
Spring, 1978(?)
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And Stephe today, from his RIT page:



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