At this location and in this house I escaped into the most magical of childhood days. Better than the secret garden story in my mind. Throwing tantrums at home guaranteed a weekend with my mentor. Fridays meant a weekend with my grandmothers and their extremely protective chihuahua, Tiny, a forever goldfish in a bowl, and my mother's brother who had left a photography position with a major local industry to join the world of war, before Elvis did, doing basic training in Kentucky before I knew where it was, then returning, with his meticulously cared for uniform and boots, after service to his country. He decided to come home, for good. No person in my family has ever entered the military since. War is indeed hell. But I have his DNA and we are the stuff of steel, which is now made in foreign countries for our auto industry. May they both rest in peace.
I called him by name even though he was the only uncle I would ever have. I had no idea, at that time, that he was teaching me the tools of this very medium you are now seeing in black and white. What a genius this man was. He could had have gone to Hollywood. With financial backing he could have beat Bill Gates to invent Apple*. He told his catholic school nuns that bats had radar and didn't need to see well and they laughed at him. He could fix a neighbor's television. He could wire a radio to your home's electrical wiring for better reception. And on Saturday nights we would bake a pizza from scratch and listen to radio dramas, Frank Sinatra, jazz or old 78s and his pristine 45 rpm collection. (I do this fifty years later myself)
...excuse me, I can smell my pizza burning...
Then years later, returning from college, again showing me how to reverse the developing process to produce black and white slides using chemistry. Pure genius. I was able to shoot Europe in black and white and Kodachrome (now history) in over a thousand frames during the very hot Bicentennial Year of the USA. He once tried to explain the binary code* used by computers to me, years before they existed in the marketplace and every home. I hated math due to its innate terror within homework. Nuns were another story. Now I love numbers realizing how simple it all really was after all. So, inside this coal heated four level duplex (which we called half-doubles) I would enter a dark room for negative developing. Glowing red-orange near the ancient round coal stove, also glowing, especially throughout the winter with its peep hole very much looking like a kiln, something I would learn in college attempting a pottery class taught by a teacher who pronounced the high art of designing building structures, Arditechure... (you can't make this stuff up) I had a photography teacher in the same college who asked people if they liked his wig... The darkroom at the university was great and perfect for hiding inside on weekends as the campus security wandered around outside and only once during the night. That's why they are called darkrooms. Hi Ho.
...time to share what's left of the toasted pizza with the dogs... Garrison on the radio.... nothing seems to change except change... the ultimate paradox
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