Photoessay #2012 - Past images

Old images pique the memory.  I first became interested with this when I first started looking at old slides from the early 1960s that my father took.  On our house and the family.  Everything made spatial sense to me, yes, that's the back patio and the screened porch and the small hillside and the back fence.

I realized that, yes it all made sense ... if you happened to be living in 1963.

Which we're not.  In 1963 any more.

That caused me to write the owners of the two houses in Sacramento that my parents owned and asked them if we could visit.  Which we did.  And, of course, those two houses belong to THOSE people now and they've made reasonable rational changes, had their own families growing up.

In both cases, the houses and yard looked great.  The only real thing that impressed me was that we were several blocks away in Arden Park, the development where we lived until I was in seventh grade.  Intellectually I knew just where we were on the map.  But none of it looked familiar to me at all.  I searched for some landmarks, a tree, anything to ground me.  But there was nothing.

I'm writing my UCSC paper.  Including Provost Thinmann gronds it somewhat.  I remember how I felt 42 years ago but not really what I said or what anybody said to me.

On the UCSC site, I found this picture of the circulation area of the UCSC Library with estimated date 1968-1970..  Was it called the McHenry library then?  Again it all makes sense, if you were living in 1970.  Looks very familiar, just like my experience.  The card catalogs were to the left with reference areas behind that.  The reserved book doom was behind the photographer and the spiral staircase.  The area on the other side of the breezeway first housed the bookstore until  it was moved down by the quarry.

It all looks familiar to me.  Nice bell bottom action by the guy in the foreground.

You don't see any computers anywhere.  Not one the circulation desk on the right.  Because there weren't any except for a machine in the basement of the Communications Building where I wrote a BASIC program to play Crazy-Eights for a class.

I know there's been a major addition.  I don't know what this entrance (is it still the main entrace?) looks like now.  But probably not like this.

I wanted to I wanted to write about an image from cnn from the Republican National Convention, a picture of a massively foreshortened picture of a mounted riot policeman.  On a horse.  And all you can really see if the horse's head.  But I couldn't figure out a way to steal, um uh, refer to it.