Getting from Here to There

How does one "become" an artist?
I recently went through an old box

of slides and had them put on CD's, reminders of my youth and the road I have been on. What turn was significant? Did I take the high road when I should have taken the low road, turned left when it was meant to be right? There were other impacts on my life not caught on film, these are just moments caught in a box. The top photo I was twelve years old and had received "The Family of Man", a photo collection of humanity, from my cousin I met while in Disneyland. What is significant about this is that I remember the title fifty years later! How can that be? Curious?
The next photo I was seventeen and doing my laundry aboard the SS Ryndam, a passenger ship that sailed from Montreal, Canada to Rotterdam, Holland. That is when I ran away "the first time", dropping out of High School and off to seek adventure! The one way ticket (I didn't know when nor if I was returning!) cost $225 for the ten day voyage. Why is this exact price in my memory? I hitch hiked my way around Europe for six months on three dollars a day! Those were the days!




The next photo on the far right is me again, proud beyond belief because I had just won this
trip for my whole family to this magical kingdom! It is on this trip that I discovered an idea can be better than reality! This was 1958, a half Century ago and Disneyland was brand new and talked about everywhere! Fantacyland, Frontierland, Adventureland, and I think some kind of
Futureland! It was exciting and crowded and dirty and tiring!






These next two pictures probably had a more significant impact
on my life, more closely resemble "who I became". Me, hanging from the tree branch represents strength and I see myself that way. In my youth I would go back packing in the mountains with
a seventy pound load strapped to my back! I loved Alaska and my
fishing adventures there and arm wrestling with the local loggers!
A lot in life is just plain accidental, without design. I dropped out of High School but completed it and went on to the University, dropping out there as well but always going back. I was trained as a history teacher and did that until there were massive layoffs and I lost my job. I went into construction mostly because a friend of mine owned the company and hired me as a construction foreman!
I didn't know a damned thing about construction! "I am hiring you because you know about people", he said. So, that is how I got there, an accident, and I loved it. Mostly I loved looking back at the end of the day, seeing all the accomplishments and figuring out what to do tomorrow!

The photo on the far right, with the printing press, was one of the most significant things that has ever happened to me! This was 1963 and the height of the Vietnam War! A friend of my brother's

was drafted and gave me this printing press and all its supplies.

This was my introduction to poetry! Although small this was a real printing press with real ink and hand-set lead pieces of type.

It produced perfect products and in the process of learning you

begin by making calling cards. I made these for myself and all

of my friends and went on to create poems which were easy to

print and...said something! In twelve lines I could create a thought

and in sixteen lines I could tell a whole story!

This last photo is Alaska, an adventure I had while eighteen years

old. I had "done Europe" but wasn't ready to settle down and make "something of my life". There was just too much I hadn't seen! That summer I took a train to Seattle Washington and walked along the docks stopping at every fishing boat, asking for a ride to Alaska! One captain had his deckhand for the summer but offered me a ride if I would paint the rails and take my turn at the helm? I didn't even know what that meant but happily hopped on board and three days later was caught in an adventure I will never forget! This was a fifty foot fishing boat and this trip to Alaska took about six days. The captain would teach me how to run it and soon enough I would get my own two hour stint while he took a nap. The captain took the tricky passages through the little channels amongst the hundreds of islands between Seattle and Alaska. His deck hand was experienced and got the second hardest routes

and when we hit the open seas where it was supposed to be safe it became my turn. The third day out in these open waters we hit a storm and the waves crashed over the boat something fierce! The captain and his deckhand became seriously seasick and spent this time rolling about the cabin floor and the boat became mine! I don't get sea sick, so on this trip, "the worst" the captain said, with six hours training, I was alone at the helm! You don't have any time to think yet thinking is all you do, or just reacting to the wheel, trying to keep the boat upright and turned straight into the waves. This was a real roller coaster ride and way better than Disneyland!

If I screwed it up we would be dead. That is a pretty cut and dried assignment. No C+ to it,

you do it right or you fail, simple as that!

World of Imagination!

We had already had one Summer vacation, that

trip to Canada where I got voted out of my desire to see Disneyland. Boy, was I excited to have won this all expense trip for the four of us. It was not first class, nor even on an airline. It was a bus trip on Grayhound lines, rumbling along the

1000 miles or so from my small town to Los Angeles, California. I had never been on a bus and never dreamed of an airplane, never seen a freeway; we didn't have any in Oregon! California had everything and the bus was huge, way off the ground giving me a grand view! I got car sick or bus sick and threw up easily! I mostly sat at the front of the bus near the driver and that was a lot better and I felt so very important!

We stopped in Reno, Nevada for an overnight, my first time at a real Hotel. My parents saw the casino and did a bit of gambling while my brother and I stayed in the motel room and watched television. We didn't have a television and that was a lot of fun. There were three channels! The next day we would be in San Fransisco visiting cousins I had never met, a trip to China Town and rides on the street cars! I could hardly sleep!

Modern Technology

Disneyland will wait and so will my "Summer Vacation" story. In discovering my Swan
photo from yesterday's blog I have realized that the photos of my youth are becoming like my memories: faded and torn and unorganized. My uncle had a really good camera, one of those "single lens reflex" kinds made in Japan. I didn't then and still don't realize what this even means, except to say he had light meters and all kinds of dials and buttons on his camera. My "Brownie Starflash" had one button, up close for portraits and flowers or moving this switch for landscapes and farther away photos. It was a camera for idiots and lazy people but it had this flash attachment which was so new for me! Even today my camera is a point and shoot although it has a lot of buttons and dials I almost always keep it on automatic mode and it thinks for itself.
My uncle lived in Washington the state north of us and would visit us about twice a year bringing a slide projector and screen with him and put on a show for us! I loved these and the concept of a little photo blown up big against the white screen. He traveled a lot for fun and for business and brought us pictures from China or India or the last exotic place he had been. Always photos with a story, an adventure! My father didn't really like these evenings but would watch them out of politeness to his brother and my uncle knew this so about every 20 pictures or so he would throw in a photo of a naked woman just to see if we were awake! I was eleven years old and very awake!
I eventually discovered that I could take slide photos with my "Brownie" camera and I was really happy with that! When we went to Disneyland I took three rolls of slide film with me.
When we returned I made popcorn for my family and put on a show and made them watch.
I still have those slides and went through them last night, digging out the same old projector
that was once my uncles, making popcorn and reliving those days and others.
I sorted out about 100 of them, from Disneyland, from old camping trips, from when I ran away when I was seventeen and went to Europe and even a couple old girlfriends and took them
to Walmart to be put on a CD. Wow, how times have changed, a hundred pictures, my entire youth, put onto a little plastic disk! If I get them today I will tell you about Disneyland tomorrow! M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E!

Disneyland, YES!!!

It was the next summer that I went to Disneyland,

taking my whole family with me, my brother who was fifteen and my parents, the "older people".

This wasn't a planed vacation, in fact it was voted out three to one! We went somewhere every summer, usually small trips, camping at the coast or the nearby mountains, mostly the ocean though because of the mosquitoes in the mountains. Once in a while, maybe every third summer we would really go somewhere, a real vacation! Not often though because I don't think my parents really liked each other and the thought of being two weeks in a tent together was just too much. That's another story and

I will probably tell you more about it because it is all a part of this educational experience and the reason I never had a Senior Year at High School. A part of "my story", so to speak. So, back to being eleven years old. One night in early summer we were sitting around the dining room table with a great discussion going on where to go for a summer vacation. My vote was Disneyland! This was 1958 and Disneyland, that imaginative fairy tale place where anything could be

had just opened! I was so excited and did my very best to sell my family on this idea. I lost out to Canada, British Columbia and some old town that so wanted to be British called Victoria! God,

how dull could that be especially compared to Disneyland and California! I was disappointed

but offered a consolation prize in the form of a "Brownie Starflash" camera! It cost $8.95 and had a built-in flash attachment with blue flashbulbs! The deal included three rolls of film, 24 pictures each and I wasn't allowed to go crazy and take pictures of everything like we can do today with the digital cameras. Three rolls plus developing, that was what I was allowed.

Now I will tell you about the contest! In those days, in our town, you bought film and had it developed at the local pharmacy. They sold fancy cameras there, made by Kodak in USA and
Cannon and other upscale cameras made in Japan. These could cost as much as $600. in 1958!
They also sold my little "Brownie Starflash" for $8.95. One day in very early summer before we were even talking about a vacation, they put posters up all over the store, announcing a giant photo contest! This was a pretty big deal for our town, sponsored by Kodak, and Grayhound Bus
and Disneyland, the top prize was an all expense trip for four to that Magical Kingdom, and boy, did I have my eye on that! They had weekly prizes of inexpensive cameras and developing services and you had to win one of these to be entered into the "Grand Prize." Dreams of youth, I wanted that so bad!
But off we went to Canada and, really, it was a fun vacation and we stopped at a hundred places along the way. One such stop was in Vancouver Canada to "Stanley Park", a beautiful, walkable botanical gardens. I am not remembering all the details here but I wanted to go about "taking pictures" and my parents and brother wanted to do something else. At eleven years old I was allowed to go on my own, walking a park in a strange land. It was thrilling and I pretended that I was a famous photographer, stopping here and there to catch this and that. One photo, THE PHOTO, actually, I have posted here. This was truely a "Kodak Moment", you just had to be there at the right place and at the right time. I was standing on a stone bridge, looking below me at a creek that went into a little pond when these swans just came drifting by, under the bridge towards the pond. I waited quietly and just took this one photo but knew in my heart it had to be pretty good.
When we got back home I rushed to the pharmacy to get my film developed. No "one hour" stuff in those days, it was a three day wait. I had two "almost perfect" pictures, these swans and another one just of the stone bridge. I entered them both and waited!
Shortening this story a bit because it is getting very long, the swans won the show, best photo of the week and by August, the best photo period!!! Second best was a portrait taken with one of those six hundred cameras and the stone bridge, my other photo, won third prize!
Tomorrow I will tell you about Disneyland in 1958!