This year my grandpa was presented with a good opportunity to sell his farm. So he did. And with that, a lifetime of accumulated stuff had to be sorted, sold, given away, hauled off, or thrown out. In true Boyer pack rat fashion, he had a lot of stuff that had to go somewhere as he prepared to move into a much smaller apartment in the local retirement community. Tucked away in drawers here and in closets there were photographic slides. 820 of them. All taken by my grandpa between about 1950 and 1976. Since I used to think that film was way cooler than digital (and I still sort of do, but film is so expensive to work with these days), we have a Nikon SuperCoolScan slide/negative scanner that can scan 50 slides in a batch. So Grandpa sent the slides to me and for the last week, I've been scanning away, converting all 820 slides to digital images. Its been a fascinating journey back in time. Grandpa was head over heels in love with Grandma, so there's lots of pictures of her and even a few from their wedding.
Before they were married, Grandpa was off serving in the Army's Signal Corps during the Korean War. I especially love these photos of military life in another time. His stories that he tells of the river near where he was stationed in Korea, R&R trips to Tokyo, passing through Guam on his way back, the few days of training he spent in Colorado Springs before they shipped out (seeing 1950's downtown CSprings was pretty cool since we lived there for 5 years), all captured forever. And there was even a photo from when they sailed underneath the Golden Gate Bridge on their way back from Korea, with the fog so thick you can barely make out the faint outline of the bridge above. Seeing these images brings all those stories he's told over the years to life.
Of course there were lovely images of my high school sweetheart parents rocking some serious 70's prom fashions too.
And my dad used to be a fairly competitive motocross racer. Sometimes I try to imagine what a badass mountain biker I'd be if he'd stuck with it, but he didn't want his little girls growing up on motorcycles--probably a good move. I just think this picture is sweet...brraapp!
I've selected about 75 of the photos and made a custom hard-bound book for Grandpa for Christmas. I wish I could be there to give it to him, but I'll be here in California and he'll be with the rest of the family in Iowa. But hopefully he'll like it just the same. Grandpa is one of those guys who truly would do anything for anyone--a great person who cares more about every single other person around him than he does about himself. It was a treat to do this for him.