In a Facebook group, I had an interesting experience. One of the group members shared a vintage photograph of the Ellsworth Air Force Base commissary checkout lines on payday. Military paydays were once a month in the late 1950s and lots of families were down to beans by the end of the month, the “too much month at the end of the money” syndrome. Commissary check-out lines were long because nearly everymom showed up for groceries. I was intrigued by the picture because my family lived at Ellsworth then.
I first looked closely at the picture to see if Mom was in the commissary photo. Since the commissary was where she shopped there was a better-than-zero possibility that Mom would have been shopping (she wasn’t). I didn’t find Mom, but my eye caught some handwriting on the photo and this handwriting looked like Dad’s. Wow. [insert big smiley face]
Handwriting on the shared Ellsworth commissary photo. That “E.A.F.B.” is iconic dad-handwriting.
Given that Dad was in charge of the photo lab at the time, and given that he did take photos for the base newspaper (my brother and I posed for a picture about the children’s books in the base library), there was a better-than-good chance of Dad having processed the photo.
In the Facebook group, I was pleased to see one of Dad’s work photos. At home, we have his pictures of the family and our travels. We have slides, prints, and a few home movies. I know the quality of Dad’s pictures, but I’d had no idea what sort of pictures he took on duty other than ID card pictures, photocopying documents (with a camera, which was how it was done before Xerox copying machines), aerial photos, and that one picture of me and my brother pretending to read books in the library. How else he spent his time behind a camera, I had no idea.
4×5-negative image of Dad on “the Putt-putt” (his scooter). He would note on the negative edges the camera settings. In my photo collection, I have many examples of Dad’s handwriting.
So, out of the blue, on Facebook, I had the happiness of seeing my Dad’s handwriting on a photo completely new to me. Family-wise, it’s like discovering an unknown Rembrandt.
Valerie Bonham 