Stone Wall

With the identically dressed men and the uncomfortable poses next to the stone foundation of some sort of municipal building, this collection has always seemed somewhat odd to me. Small town American Gothic for lack of a better description. My best guess on the date would be very late teens to early twenties. That means that these men survived World War 1 and their small children would have to live through World War 2.

Green Bay Business College- Mr. Kenneth Bierke

From the "MODERN ART STUDIO, LUXEMBURG, WIS." A portrait of Mr. Kenneth Bierke of the Green Bay Business College. The last image from the collection. Click on Green Bay in the labels section to bring up the other 11 posts.

Green Bay Business College- Vacation Snapshots

Well, this is a close to a New Year's resolution as I'll ever get. It's time to finish off the Green Bay Business College collection. A few years ago I purchased a large envelope of prints, addressed to Kenneth Bierke, care of the Green Bay Business College. From pictures of school dances in the 50's, to family and vacation pictures, to color photos of Mrs. Bierke during World War 2, there is quite a lot of material. I'm the first to admit that this group isn't the most interesting of the lot, but click on Green Bay in the labels section, and they will not disappoint. The next post will be the last. And by the way, I was even able to locate the Prince Arthur Hotel. It was opened on March 14, 1911 by the Canadian National Railway in Thunder Bay, Ontario.

Egyptian Styled Flapper

In my research, I've found a half dozen or so theories as to the origin of the word flapper. My favorite is that it referred to the flapping of wings; the wings of the newly free women of the 1920's. Anyway, flappers made their appearance in the years after World War 1 in both the United States and Great Britain. They bobbed their hair, smoked, drank, wore short dresses or uniquely styled clothes, used make-up, went to petting parties, had sex before marriage, and what seemed to me the most important thing, they worked. The head piece that this lady is wearing looks to be an Egyptian design. Why is the old man in the second picture staring so intently at this young woman?

Bhutanese Milkmen in Stereo

I've written about Keystone, and Underwood & Underwood, the two largest stereoview companies in the United States in past posts. Anyone interested in going into more detail should click on stereoview in the labels section. In my post of November 28, 2009, "Underwood & Underwood, Geography" I dealt specifically with the Underwood brothers and their company. The backbone of the stereoview industry was geographic images. Staff photographers and free lancers provided many Americans with the only window on the wider world that they would ever know. I was born in 1955 and my first grade teacher still used old stereoviews to teach us geography. The caption on this card reads, "Bhutanese milkmen with curious bamboo-jars, at the public Fountain, Darjeeling, India. Copyright 1903 by Underwood &Underwood."

True Found Photography

This should be the last post for the next three or four days, which makes it the last for 2010, so I thought I'd end up with something more symbolic than visually interesting. This summer, June and July, I worked for the Census Bureau. In one of the older, run down apartment buildings I visited, I found these five snapshots. They were in the garbage that had been removed from a vacated unit. Most of my found photographs are found in thrift shops, antique malls, and EBay, but finding something that has been thrown out or left behind, well that doesn't happen often. I often wonder why people discard their old family photographs. These all have a printers stamp dated, "AUG 60," and 50 years isn't all that old. It's quite probable that the people in these photos are all still alive. Did the person who left these behind, after saving them for half a century, just give up on their memories of the past?

Was She a (Second Tier) Movie Star?

This small (2.5x4) photo was taken by a professional photographer or an advanced amateur with a home studio. Or...This woman looks very familiar. I went to the IMDB website and looked up pictures of a number of the second tier movie stars from the forties and fifties and didn't find a match. This could be a photo distributed by one of the fan clubs run by the movie studios to publicize the career of their contract players.