We’re a Kodak family. That’s not such a strange thing being where I am from. By 1982 more than 60,000 people in Rochester worked for the ‘yellow box.’ At its height Kodak reigned supreme as the number one film supplier world wide. In 1946 my parents met at a KPAA basketball game; dad was a star player, my uncle Jeff introduced them to each other. Dad went on to spend his entire adult career working there, retiring in 1986 after 42 years of service. Most of my family either worked there, or had at some point spent time with them. Needless to say we took pictures...lots and lots and lots of pictures. My mother was never without camera in hand. It was a relatively normal experience to have more damned pictures of us all looking less than enthused to be having our pictures taken. By the time I came along in the late ‘60’s the norm was color slides in our house. The photographic evidence of my baby years is daunting as is the entire first half of the 1970’s - twenty six carousel trays, some double trays holding up to 140 slides. Luckily the slides were kept in what was probably as close to archival storage as possible... our front hall closet rarely deviated from 50 degrees year round. The stacks and stacks of trays lived there for as long as I can remember, only coming down for periodic shows... you know, those 70’s style, “Let’s invite our friends over to see the slides from Hawaii!” shows...Ummm, yeah. Fun. If I thought the slideshows were boring, I was in for a hell of a great time scanning them 30 years later.
