I guess you had to be there

Another batch of family pictures.

Mom and dad took a couple of trips to Mexico in 1969 and 1970. The second trip was with Walt and Lupe Sullins.

None of these are interesting to me. Out-of-the-way Mexico has no draw on me. I got itchy looking at the scenery. About the only picture that interested me was laundry day:

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A whole roll was not in focus.

The first 44 pictures have individual notes written on them. I wasn't interested enough to transcribe them. If anybody needs to know details about any of them, just ask.

But for completeness, here they are, all 99 of them (one slot was empty).

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Muchos Murphys

There's not a lot to say about this lot of pictures.

Jack, Maggie and Karen continue their trip to Lake Powell and Rainbow Bridge. Karen's got some great earrings.

Christmas 1977 is very underexposed. We have a grumpy cat.

We warp ahead to July 3, 1985, when Mom had a birthday party at work. She had an admirer.

We do the time warp again. We move ahead two more years to July 11 & 12, 1987 when the Murphys got together .

The upcoming slides do a lot more time-tripping. It will be interesting to see where we go next.

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More Travels with Karen

Last time, we saw Karen and Jack on a trip to see three of his sisters. They continue their trip in this installment. They visit Herbie and see sights in the Los Angeles area.

I have a poor memory. I was living in the L. A. area at the time but I have no memory of this visit. Maybe Karen can tell me if they saw me. Somehow I think not. I'm not in any of the pictures.

They saw:

• Disneyland
• Marineland of the Pacfic
• Knott's Berry Farm

We have the family Christmas again. It doesn't seem to be quite the extravaganza of earlier years. Mom got something very romantic! Jack really embraced the CB radio craze. He gave each of us our own radio. Poss was this year's lucky recipient. Mine came years later and never worked, not that I cared.

We see another of Jack's Red Periods. It starts in Kiowa.

Karen and Jack take Mom and hit the road again. They see Lake Powell with a stop at the Four Corners Monument.

Lake Powell was my introduction to environmentalism. My sophomore year Social Studies class had a semester where we studied environmental issues. It started with Mrs. Bolsterli showing us two movies. The first was a beautifully produced Sierra Club movie that showed us the beauty and grandeur of Glen Canyon before it was flooded. Then, without comment, we saw a movie made by the Bureau of Reclamation that showed us the glories of hard-working men, heavy equipment and concrete. They built a dam that controlled the river and formed a lake that gave us a beautiful recreation area, irrigation and flood control. Discuss (or was it "disgusting!"?). I've never been there.

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Travels with Karen

Picture time again!

Karen became quite the traveler in the mid-1970s. She had been to Emporia and now finishes the trip to Washington, DC, that she started in the last batch of pictures.

In this batch of pictures that takes us from April, 1975, to Summer, 1976, we'll see:

• More of Karen's trip to Gettysburg and DC
• A deep snow
• Bobbie's graduation from college
• Christmas, 1975. I can't make out any of the presents I got. I suggested last time that one of the reasons we had no Christmas orgies in 1973 and 1974 might be because we were getting too old for that sort of stuff. I was wrong. It was just the Ewwww-dena factor. She's gone and Christmas is back to normal. It looks like Sandy Klaus gave mom her first microwave oven this year.
• Karen and Jack visited two of his sisters. I've never met Tuck. She and Jack seemed not to exist to each other (see "Sister's Selfish Coat") until their mother died. It looks like Tuck's family loves plaid. If it weren't for Karen, Jack and Tuck's normal clothes I think we would have an "Awkward Family Photos" candidate here.
• They then traveled to Wyoming...
• to see Nene.
• Karen and Jack took another trip in the Summer of 1976 to see his uncle Floyd and Margaret. If Jack had been wearing this outfit back there with Tuck, that would have made the photo truly awkward.
• They went south to see another of Jack's sisters, Herbie.

Karen sure did get around.

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Grandma (Gram)

Here come nearly two years of our lives. But no Christmases!

Reasons for not having a massive Christmas orgy in 1973:

• Mom and Dad got divorced.
• Dad got remarried. Christmas orgy with Ewwww-deena? I don't think so.
• Karen was the only one of us still living at home. The rest of us were in college or beyond. We're getting a little old for that kind of stuff.

No Christmas orgy in 1974:

• See above.

What we do see are:

• More branding at Mabel's
• Beth graduates from Highlands University. Pictures of a graduation! A first!
• 1974 passes without a single picture (in this collection...some time ago I shared with the family some pictures of a trip Jack and Eudena took through the Grand Canyon and Salt Lake City. I wonder where those pictures are.)
• Karen and Dad took a trip to Emporia in January 1975.
• Dad and Peggy took a trip to Emporia for Gradma's (Gram's) funeral.
• Mom and Karen took a trip to Washington, DC, and Gettysburg. Whoever took the pictures didn't know how to properly set the exposure. Most are underexposed. Lots are almost black. Sorry, there's not much I could do to bring out detail. I left them all in for some reason.
• You don't see a single picture with me in it. Bobbie is absent, too.

Everyone seems to call Grandma "Gram." I don't remember calling her that.

Here is June 1973 through April 1975.

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Peggy's Big Day

I was looking through the Awkward Family Photos and thought that we probably have some contenders. I got inspired to try to find something in the next batch of pictures. I got out the next carousel of slides and scanned away.

I didn't find anything terribly awkward.

In the post-Christmas, 1972, slides we get to see the family standing around my telescope. You might remember my mirror blank I got for Christmas in 1970. Two years later I have a telescope but not with a mirror that I ground. Nope, it has a commercially made mirror. The tube and tripod weren't featured in the Christmas, 1972, pictures so I'm thinking it wasn't a Christmas present. I'm pretty sure I bought the mirror myself. I'm not sure about the tube and tripod. They might have been presents or maybe I bought them myself. I just don't know. What I do know is that the telescope never worked very well.  Two years of putting together a telescope were pretty much a waste of time.

The big event of 1973 was Peggy and Allan's wedding and reception. A fun time was had by all.

Fortunately, I missed out on helping brand Mabel's cattle. A bit more of that in the next batch of slides!

I graduated from high school around this time. There is no record of that. But then, there was no record of anyone else's graduations. Maybe there are Poloroids of those events.

Christmas 1972 to June 1973:

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Ghosts of Christmases past

Picture torture time again! I'm burning a vacation day even though I'm rather busy at work. I'm not going to donate my hard-earned vacation time back to the company.

It's a wet day so the outdoors aren't calling me. I did a little tidying up around my computer desk and found a scanner under the mess! That made me remember all the slides we have yet to see.

Here's Carousel 21!

We're still stuck in a rut. Christmas, Christmas, Tucumcari and Christmas. All in 100 slides.

Christmas 1970 (on brilliant Kodachrome) was underway before 6:00am.

That year I got my telescope mirror blank and the grinding material. Jack got me a heavy metal table that we put in my bedroom. I used that for my grinding platform. I worked on grinding that piece of glass for more than a year. I started out with enthusiasm but it became a chore. I got it ground down to the approximate sagitta for an f/8 mirror. I even polished it. I couldn't figure out the knife-edge test for determining the shape of the mirror's surface. Without mastering that test and the follow-up correcting of the surface I couldn't finish the mirror. After more than a year I bought a finished mirror. The resulting telescope never worked very well. It's still in the rafters of the garage.

But I saved my disk of Pyrex with its smooth, curved surface.

My mirror (in progress) with the chandelier reflecting in it

Christmas 1971 (horribly overexposed) was under way at 7:00am.

Allan was our guest this year.

Karen got some nice loot:

• A purple cow
• A really groovy sleeping bag
• A cucumber!

We visited Mom's kinfolk in Tucumcari in December, 1972.

We posed for pre-present photos at 6:40am Christmas 1972 (many overexposed). 

This year Bobbie had a gentleman caller.

Peggy and Poss got some crocheted caps and stuff. Who made those? Why didn't I get a cap? I got a blazer instead.

I got a soprano recorder and a lesson book for it. Dogs will howl tonight!

If you want to see a lot of the same thing just look at this photo album. Not recommended for non-family...you'll be bored out of your gourd.

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Merry Christmas 1968, 1969 and 1970!

This ain't gonna happen again. Today was a really crappy day so what was there to do but sit beside a scanner and scan?

So you get a second batch of family pictures in a single day!

We have:

• The rest of Christmas 1968. The clock (seen in the earlier part) shows presents yet to be unwrapped at 6:15.
• ...featuring baby Chris!
• A visit with Floyd and Margaret. I believe that this was the time I had to share a bedroom with Brent or Bradd. One night I lay in the top bunk and was weirded out at having to have a strange person in the room with me. I couldn't sleep. Then I blinked and instantaneously it was the next morning. I hadn't moved a muscle. I didn't dream. There was no feeling of passage of time. Weird.
• Many underexposed and overexposed pictures. There isn't much information in them to try to coax out with image processing. Sorry.
• Karen's sixth birthday. We haven't seen the May celebration in a couple of years. Karen gets all the attention!
• Christmas 1969 with big Chris. The clock shows 5:50. I thought as kids got older they managed to sleep later! The TV is new this year. Jack and I built it from a Heathkit. I'm amazed that the thing actually worked.
• The Durango/Silverton train (then the Denver & Rio Grand Western now the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad). I think this was the trip that Jack put half the people on the train in Durango and drove the rest to Silverton. Then everybody (save Jack) switched rides. Jack took the pictures of the train but not from the train. The film used for these pictures (and the Christmas pictures to follow) is Kodachrome. It does show the bluish cast mentioned in the Wikipedia article. I didn't try to correct that. But at least the pictures finally have saturated colors and are nicely exposed!
• Christmas 1970. Clock shows 5:35. Earlier yet! Go figure.

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Merry Christmas 1968

Time flies! It seems like just a few days ago it was Christmas 1967. A year has passed.

Here is the next carousel of family slides.

• Penny and Al visit.
• Karen prepares for a life of crime.
• Jack goes hunting. The slides are labeled "Jack & deer." That's not really Jack, it it? And it is a pronghorn, right?
• Karen turns five!
• Christmas brings a puppy!

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(I'm sure my scanning of these slides won't continue at this pace.)

Merry Christmas 1967!

It's been a very long time since my last installment of picture torture. That edition ended with the beginning (6:10-6:18 am) of our Christmas, 1967, festivities. Now, at last!, we get to see the next ten minutes of the fun!

Next, we enjoy a visit with Nene, Jackie, Dan and Steve. There are 41 pictures of us sitting on the couch and a child's folding chair. Well, a few at the end are of us standing in a line and looking (blurrily) at the camera. Not a lot is going on here.

We find out that the fruit trees in the back yard were planted in the Spring of 1968.

We celebrate all the May events, birthdays and Mother's Day, on May 12. We waited till 7:00 to dig into our festively wrapped presents. Poss got some luggage. There was luggage at Christmas, too. Was some message being sent? Whose writing is on the big box (our misspelled last name)? I thought it was Jack's but he wouldn't spell his own name wrong, would he? There's the nice touch of having our artificial Christmas tree set up (but not decorated).

Why do Karen and Grandma get presents? I suppose it would have been rude to leave them out but they got more in November (and I didn't). It looks like Peggy wasn't left out, either. There's her typewriter with the marshmallow keys.

Peggy gets dressed up to graduate from high school.

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Ai, Chihuahua!

In January, 1971, the family (minus Poss, who had gotten far too many demerits to deserve the opportunity to join us) took to the road and visited the capital of the Mexican state of Chihuahua. I told a story of this trip earlier.

Here are the pictures from that trip.

I am completely bummed because there are no pictures of Pancho Villa's widow nor his death car. I was looking forward to seeing our photos of them.

The things we get to see are:

• Outside Pancho Villa's house
• An aqueduct (featured on the state's Coat of Arms)
• Murals by Aarón Piña Mora in the Government Palace of Chihuahua
• A statue of Pancho Villa
• The Mines of Santa Eulalia (this Harper's article by Lew Wallace makes it sound like this is a place we wanted to see)
• Scenery around the city

Chihuahua, Chihuahua, Mexico

Here is a better picture of the execution of Hidalgo.

Anybody know anything about the unidentified scenery around town?

Another batch of family photos

The 17th carousel of slides will have very little appeal to non-family readers. And most of the pictures won't be terribly interesting to the family. But I scanned them so here they are. They are from Summer, 1967, and Christmas.

To give you an idea of what you're skipping by not looking at the pictures they include:

• Cute, cute, cute, cute Karen (and Doughie) (and chocolate stains)
  
• The rest of the kids
• Aunt Cecilia
• Ray and Helen Hanson
• Christmas 1967, featuring Marvel the Mustang

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Spring 1967

When I hauled the family slides back from my visit to Los Alamos last fall my goal was to see pictures of my parents' wedding and the road trip from hell. I went through a binge and achieved my goal. And I took a break from the scanner.

I had thought that I would scan a carousel of slides last Friday when I took a day off from work. But I napped instead. I sat down after lunch and woke up just before Jerry got home. Oh, well.

Then Mom sent me all the slides that didn't make it home with me last Fall. They came today. Inspiration!

Here are some pictures from Spring 1967. We get a visit from the Jordans.

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Leaving Hell

As promised, here's the end of the mythical 1966 family road trip.  I think some of the pictures are in Canada.  We get to see Old Faithful burp a little eruption.  The park ranger said that after such a dud of an eruption the next would happen much sooner than the usual 90 minutes.  But that was too long to wait so we kept moving.  We head south (past the Tetons?).

Herbie, Dave, Ricky, and Carol visit.

Jack goes hunting.  There were bison near Las Vegas?

We see Christmas, 1966, and Easter, 1967.  Karen loves chocolate.  And Doughie.

That is probably my last journey to Easter service.  I think I dropped out of The Church when I was around 12.

The perimeter fence is secured.  Have we really left Hell behind?

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Driving deeper into Hell

We're back from the beach near Portland and get our pictures taken in Aunt Marcella and Uncle Harold's living room. Then we have a fun day at the Portland Zoo. We take a scenic drive up the Columbia River. Then, O Canada! By ferry! Cool! (Wasn't there any scenery in Washington?)

Now we're roughing it. I guess this is where Hell really kicked in. We take a balogna stop (but they look like hamburgers to me). Then it looks like the slides got dropped on the floor. We're in Yellowstone for a while then back to the ferry. I've made no attempt to get them back in order.

Be glad you survived to tell the tale.

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(Only 22 more pictures of this trip. Then we'll go back to enjoying the darling Karen!)

We're all going to hell!

And now for the moment you've been waiting for! The Family Vacation From Hell!

But first, Christmas, 1964, a visit from the Murphys, a trip to Emporia, Christmas, 1965, and a trip to Ohio. The trip to Ohio has no pictures of people. There are pictures of some of our ancestors' headstones in David's Cemetery. I didn't know our grandfather was a Mason. Who are the others?

Then we start our June, 1966, trip of the west. From the pictures (there are 172 of them, 50 in this set), the trip doesn't appear to be that miserable. Coming in the next set are four or five pictures in a campground that probably contain some misery. The rest are pictures of nice scenery (though usually taken from a moving carryall) or visits with relatives (which can be miserable).

I was disappointed that little Doughie doesn't show up until we've left Portland. I wanted to see her as a tiny puppy and I was hoping to see her albino littermate. Oh, well. She doesn't show up much. I guess it's a case of been-there-done-that. We had a flood of Poughie pictures then almost nothing of Doughie.

Let's go to hell!

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(Sorry that I'm already going against my desire to reduce the torture content of my blog. I'm not posting all three carousels with our infamous trip all at once. You don't want to overdose. They'll come a set each day for the next few days. Those of you who don't care about family snapshots might want to go outside for a smoke till we get this phase of our lives out of the way.)

More of Karen. And Pough.

As the title of this post says, here are pictures of Karen and Pough. A handful of pictures feature others.

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Fuzzy end of a road trip and a new family member

We finally reach the end of our 1964 road trip. We see Sutter's Mill, San Francisco, Lake Tahoe, Nevada and Utah. Most of these pictures, except most of San Francisco, are from Jack's point of view from the driver's seat of the car. The moving car. As a result, much of this part of the trip is a washed out blur. You can skip a lot of these pictures.

The San Francisco segment is in the order they are in the carousel. The pictures had been arranged thematically. We go from under the Golden Gate Bridge to driving across it then back under it.

When we got home Jack took some pictures of the family. Such a pretty family!

Then we get a puppy! Such a cute puppy!

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Summer trip to California continues

Here is another round of pictures. My new printer/copier/scanner is much faster than the old scanner so I can whip these out much faster. (Sorry to all of you bored people out there who don't get to have these pictures trigger reminiscences. But you really shouldn't be sorry.)

We finish Knott's Berry Farm then go to The Happiest Place on Earth. Did Jack lower the happiness factor or did we have nonstop fun? We hit the beach! Then it's off to Sacramento.

The thing I remember most about Sacramento was Floyd's garage door. It was the kind that rolls up rather than a solid door that swings up. That fascinated me. I made plans in my little head to disassemble it and rearrange the pieces of the track and make it into a roller coaster (I guess the Matterhorn was still on my mind). I don't think that there was enough track to do that. And our little butts would have gotten pinched rather badly as the sections of the door moved back and forth.

Izzy was astonished that three adults and five kids could survive a road trip in a '55 Chevy. Grandma doesn't show up in pictures before or after the Claremont stop so I'm guessing that she was already there. Still, only two adults and five kids in a sedan does sound crowded. Was Candy gone?

P-Doobie is right about Jack not stopping to take pictures from the car. The last two pictures look like the car was moving...the foreground is a blur in those pictures. Life is too short to stop and stretch legs once in a while. (Please tell me that he had one of the passengers take those pictures!)

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When I was living in Los Angeles in 1976 I went to Disneyland many times. I was looking forward to riding in a flying saucer all by myself. In 1964 Bobbie and I were too light to ride them alone so we had to weigh one down together. Imagine my disappointment when I got there and there were no flying saucers! It was not a Happy Place that day.

Hitting the road

Here are another three months of our lives.  Karen is featured, of course.

Jack seems to have made a trip to Dayton then we made a road trip to California.  Knott's Berry Farm, here we come!

I can't think of a lot to say about these so, without further ado, here's Spring, 1964!

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