Found Photos Friday: 1960s Americana 3

As I scanned these images and processed them for color correction, I noticed one person prevalent in many shots. The slides seem to follow him as he ages, moves westward, marries, and then they simply stop. I like to think that someone in his family has the rest and appreciates what a treasure they are. All I know about these slides is that they likely came from an estate sale. So, like the casino in the first picture and shoreline in the last, in all probability all the people in these slides are also gone. In fact, with the exception of only a few buildings and the geography in some of the latter images, everything these slides record is gone -- the people, cars, buildings, and arguably the way of life the generations in the slides were accustomed to.

As I write this, Congress is debating the country's finances. In short, a small number of exceedingly wealthy people who will draw a government paycheck will soon make decisions that have real-world ramifications for tens of thousands of government employees, companies that support the government, and companies that support those companies. Furloughs, lay-offs, and reductions in general detriment individual livelihoods and foster socio-economic class-spanning economic instability. Perhaps many of these types of struggles didn't make it to the whitewashed history text books McGraw Hill fed us throughout school, but I don't know that politicians played Russian roulette with the financial well being of the masses as willingly as they do today. And these photos reflect a way of life bred of financial security and stability.

What better to represent the ephemera we live in daily than flowers -- ephemera made manifest.



This photo can actually be closely dated. This was in with some other Beverly Shores shots and was, I believe, the result of the 1954 Lake Michigan Seiche.