I’ve sifted through 13 rotary carousels of slides (each rotary carousel has 100 slots) and in the process burned out the bulb to our Sawyer Projector. The bulb, I would guess, was over 60 years old and I was thankful that it lasted as long as it did. I suspect that there are more slides buried about my house but for now I am concentrating on these 13 carousels.
Digitizing the slides involves using my a Kodak Scanza (a stand-alone slide scanner), a light board, and my iMac to put everything together. The process is time consuming and the quality of the digitized slide is not bad but not quite the quality of today’s digital photos (think iPhone).
My intention is to digitize all of the slides, photos, negatives that I have and that is a considerable amount of work. I will only be posting on my blog a fraction of the digitized images but when I am done I will share a flash drive of everything with Marilyn, Vivian, Nataly and Sophia.
A sampling from Slide Carousel 1—
- June 1977, Slots 1—23 from Guatamala. My parents visted us in Honduras and Guatamala during June, 1977. Cheryl and I had just completed our first year at the Escuela Internacional Sampedrana. We met my parents at the Guatemala City Airport and began by exploring the village of Panajachel. I had visited this place on several occasions while living in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. It is a major tour stop for visitors to Guatemala. The place is incredibly beautiful. Panajachel is located on the Northeast shore of Lake Atitlán which is surrounded by 3 volcanos. (A reminder to my 3 daughters, Cheryl was my first wife and there are a few slides of her (Carousel 2). We were married in Salt Lake City, April 27, 1974, separated in July, 1978 and the divorce was finalized in Salt Lake City, November 19, 1979.)
- Slots 27 to 41 are taken from Copán, an archaeological site of the Maya civilization (Ruinas de Copán). It is located inside Honduras near the border with Guatemala.
- Slot 42 is a single shot of Bob with a date of August 1958.
- Slot 44 is a photo (Dec 1960) of The Montana Deaconess School in Helena, Montana (constructed 1919). My parents sponsored a young adult Christian fellowship group through our church in Great Falls, Montana. It was called Wesley Fellowship and was a huge part of their lives. The Deaconess School was an orphanage in Helena. The slides are from a visit by Wesley Fellowship to the Deaconess School during Christmas vacation. Marilyn, Bob, and I participated in many Wesley Fellowship events including this visit to the Deaconess School. The objective was for each child to receive a gift and personal attention from the young adults who participated.
The visit to the orphanage was an overnight one. Marilyn and I were housed in a dorm room. It was at this site that Marilyn recounted the story of Ben Hur to me, in great detail. Ben Hur, the movie staring Charlton Heston, had recently come to Great Falls and my parents took Marilyn to see it. Tickets cost $3.00 and it played at the Rainbow Theatre (Marilyn can correct me if any of these details are wrong). Her retelling of the story was fascinating. I wanted to see this movie… badly. My parents did take me to see it eventually. The majority of the rest of the slides in Carousel 1 are from the Methodist Deaconess School (1961), Wesley Fellowship (1963), and the First Methodist Church of Great Falls (1958, 1961).
In summer of 1980 I returned to Salt Lake City after my third and final year as a teacher at the Escuela Internacional Sampedrana in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. This was the summer before going to Rome to teach at the Notre Dame International School. I joined up with a good friend, Rod Walrath (Slot 55) whom I have unfortunately lost communication with.
Rod Walrath was a great friend to me. At the time he was the pastor of Gilead Baptist Church. Cheryl and I were live-in custodians of the Campus Christian Center at the University of Utah. I met Rod at one of the Center’s Staff meetings and we quickly became friends. Unfortunately I have lost contact with most my friends after leaving the States for Honduras, Italy, and Peru. My last contact with Rod was with his answering machine when Hedy and I made a call to him (July, 1981) but were only able to leave a message on his answering machine. We invited him to come to Rome for a big adventure. He was such a good man. I wish we were still in contact.
It’s important I include a picture of my church in Great Falls, Montana. This was the church I was raised in. The minister was Reverend Vernon Hanks. I still remember how captivated I was by his children’s story before we were ushered to our childrens’ room at the church. Gad-that’s almost 70 years ago. He was supportive of my mother and father as a young couple sponsoring the Wesley Fellowship during his tenure. The Wesley Fellowship sponsored wonderful Halloween Parties in the large social hall and Christmas was always a holy celebration with a candle light ceremony. Very impressive to my sister, brother and me. And it seems we often had pancake breakfasts after church for certain occasions.
And that concludes my first Family History Update. That’s quite a mess what with the jumping around in the timeline of our life. It really is quite a potpouri. On the final product when I move everything to a flash drive I plan to place the photos in folders by year. That will bring events into a more logical sequence. For now, I’m just taking the rotary carousels as they stand and getting the images preserved in a digital format.
