We’re a Kodak family. That’s not such a strange thing being where I am from. By 1982 more than 60,000 people in Rochester worked for the ‘yellow box.’ At its height Kodak reigned supreme as the number one film supplier world wide. In 1946 my parents met at a KPAA basketball game; dad was a star player, my uncle Jeff introduced them to each other. Dad went on to spend his entire adult career working there, retiring in 1986 after 42 years of service. Most of my family either worked there, or had at some point spent time with them. Needless to say we took pictures...lots and lots and lots of pictures. My mother was never without camera in hand. It was a relatively normal experience to have more damned pictures of us all looking less than enthused to be having our pictures taken. By the time I came along in the late ‘60’s the norm was color slides in our house. The photographic evidence of my baby years is daunting as is the entire first half of the 1970’s - twenty six carousel trays, some double trays holding up to 140 slides. Luckily the slides were kept in what was probably as close to archival storage as possible... our front hall closet rarely deviated from 50 degrees year round. The stacks and stacks of trays lived there for as long as I can remember, only coming down for periodic shows... you know, those 70’s style, “Let’s invite our friends over to see the slides from Hawaii!” shows...Ummm, yeah. Fun. If I thought the slideshows were boring, I was in for a hell of a great time scanning them 30 years later.
In 2003 I had a great idea to convert them all to digital. The process is still not completely finished, but it’s close(er). What possessed me to tackle a project of this scope in the first place I can’t rightly remember. I think at the time we were planning a 75th birthday party for my father. The thought of being able to hand a DVD containing 10 years of family history not only to him but all my siblings sounded like a worthwhile project. So I kicked off the adventure the last week of January, 2003. My two month old (then) Mac powerbook in tow, along with a Nikon 4000ED slide scanner and auto-feeder purchased specifically for the project, I hopped a plane and headed for my father’s house for 7 days of intense... process watching. Normally there isn’t a hell of a lot to do up there anyway so I was glad I would have ‘work’ to do. Little did I know the job ahead of me would really wind up being a greater task than I had originally foreseen. What happened (after USAirways lost my luggage, underwear, socks and more than $2,000 of brand new scanning equipment... I was not happy) was a series of intense 8 hour days of: watch, adjust, tweak, crop, save, repeat. It could have been a non-stop marathon but I told myself I’d only work from 9-5 even though I had all the time in the world. Watching stacks of slides load from an auto-feeder is less than exciting, but what was interesting was seeing the steady progression of history from mid 1967 onward. My mother had kept the trays in impeccable order and condition, so each was a snapshot of time, usually starting mid year for Father’s day and my father’s birthday, moving on to the 4th of July, the run of birthdays in August, Labor Day at my aunt Ann’s house, the beginning of school, my brother Steve’s birthday, Halloween, 
Thanksgiving, etc. Of course each tray saw us all getting older, fashions changing, girl friends, boy friends, spouses, etc. entering and leaving the picture. Vague recollections of who/what/where helped me identify many of the situations and unknown faces, but when I got stuck I would grab my father and ask. Surprisingly he too would get stumped every now and then, this the man who seemingly knew EVERYONE and everyone knew him. Luckily, my mother’s planning shone through once more, leaving notes on the inside lids of the carousel boxes. Sometimes we all just sat around staring at the scans thinking, “who the hell IS that?!“ Being one of seven I take for granted the sheer numbers of cousins, aunts, uncles and extended family I have always had around me. The family photos only reiterated to me just how large a family I come from... and what a history.
A week isn’t all that much time actually. And I didn’t finish the job that January. Seven years later there are still five trays sitting on the shelf in my office, reminding me of unfinished work. A preliminary DVD saw the light of day back in 2003 but it never went ‘gold’ so to speak. I’ve attempted to restart the project a number of times but have run out of steam in each of those instances. Seven years goes by in a blink of an eye. My job, my friends, my family, my self... my computer equipment - all different. I should have really gotten the job done back then as now Nikon doesn’t support the scanning software on the Mac platform any longer (Curse you Nikon). Interestingly enough I AM still using the same titanium powerbook, it still runs beautifully, albeit a tiny bit slower with the latest version of MacOSX. I may scoff at the iPhone, but you will have to pry my mac computers from my cold, dead hands. Enough on that. So I am now in a period of wrapping up old projects, cleaning house and starting some new chapters in my life... time to finish this scanning project.
As I said, a lot changes in one or two years, let alone seven. I suppose another trigger to wrap up this loose end has been what Dave has been going through clearing/cleaning/sorting out his mother’s house. His mother died in early April of this year and he has been working steadily since then to deal with the mountain of accumulation his mother, Peg Ankers, amassed over 30 years at their house on Penn Street. Each day he spends in West Chester he comes home with new ‘treasures’... yes, can you feel my sarcasm? I have to say that some of these things are actually pretty cool. I especially enjoy the pics and stories of the very strange books he’s come across, along with some really fascinating magazine and newspaper articles... but what has gotten me is the family photos. Yes, again with the photos and slides. Right after his mother died Dave asked me to scan a number of shots of Peg at various ages. It was really interesting to see her at seminal points in her life: as a young girl; a shot of her with her co-workers at he NY Times; with her children in her arms. It meant a lot for me to be able to do that for him. He had the photos blown up and displayed at her viewing. Many people lingered over the young Peggy Collins with her mother and brother in Florida, her and Dave’s father on their wedding day... how quickly a life can be encapsulated in a small picture show.
So I think I’ll surprise my family and deliver the long promised family photos DVD 1967-1976. Most of them have stopped asking me about it, so now is the perfect time, right? I had really hoped my father would enjoy using it, but he can barely operate his remote control let alone the overly complicated DVD player I bought him 5 years ago. “Why bother?” floats through my head... no one else seems to even care about those photos. Perhaps I’m doing it for myself.
My dad and I were talking about all the photo albums and pictures in the house a number of years ago. “I suppose they’ll all just get tossed out when I go, ” he said. “Absolutely NOT!” I shot back at him. “I’ll take them all now if you really don’t want them!” He laughed a little. I suppose he was laughing at the sight of me carting them all off (there are boxes and boxes and boxes of them). Or maybe he was just happy that someone cared enough to keep all the photos my mother had spent her life collecting. No, I’m not doing it for myself. I’m doing it for her.
