Bruddas

Monkey

Woman in Red, c. 1937. Kodachrome Glass Mounted Slide.

Desert sands in the foreground, snow-capped mountain peaks in the background.

I think this picture is from somewhere in Nebraska. The $3.95 Ranch Steak special reminds me of the 99¢ Sirloin special advertised by the Ponderosa Steak House. I can appreciate a cheap steak but 99¢ sounded a little too cheap.

I hope we get a lot of snow this winter.

A cellist from 1943 looks through the cracked pane of a glass-mounted slide. Her name is Yolanda, and this slide is dated May 15, 1943.

Sometimes the look in a child’s eyes bear the disdain and accusation of a much older person.

You spring from my loin. Now swim!

Man Standing In His Garden, 1942.

Something I have taken for granted these past months while scanning hundreds upon hundreds of slides each day is the fact that many people think of America in the 1950s and 1940s as being in black and white. Kodachrome gives the lie to that assumption and shows what we did, of course, know. We know that life was in color before color television and color movies, but how often do we see or pay much mind to real-life color images from the 1940s?

This slide is dated 1942. At 67 years old this is the oldest slide in my collection.

A friend recently made an interesting point about slides. He said that slides differ from prints because “that piece of film was there.” The scrap of film used for a Kodachrome slide was actually there where the picture was taken.

That’s kinda cool.

Happiness. Happy American people. Is happiness complicated, or is it simple enough that it can only be complicated?

Smiling face. United States of America. 1950s Kodachrome Slide.

I love this picture. This is one of over 900 slides I recently posted, showing windows into the lives of an American family living in Germany during the 1950s. In this picture it looks like daddy stopped the car to take this beautiful shot of his daughters in front of the Neustadt Weinstrasse — a large vineyard. The license plate on the car reads “U.S. Forces in Germany” and helped solve what was, for me, a bit of a mystery as to who these people were. Being an Army Brat myself I identified with the adventure of being an American child whose earliest memories are from far away lands. My memories center around Laos, and the American School of Vientiane where my sister and I went to school. I was too young to have memories as articulate as (I would imagine) those of these 2 girls, who seem to have spent  a large part of their childhood traveling overseas. You can click this picture (or click here) to see larger versions.

Germany, 1957. Girl playing solitaire. From a series of hundreds of slides showing a U.S. family in Germany during the 1950s.