Photorganizing

I have been fiendishly organizing photographs. See; it all started on putting the Jakarta shots away. One thing ran into the next, until it got to the point where I was handling a couple of hundred slides from the family collection. Since it is exclusively in my hands, now, there are new elements of organization in the thing, as well as numerous additions to the digital archive (scans of prints and tranparencies). You can imagine; all this took some time.

Some fruits of the labors:

*** A fine shot of Dad very early on Christmas morning, 1969.

The large window in the living-room of that house opened directly east on Kaneohe Bay. That was the first light of the day. (Kodachrome transparency, which looks a lot better than this scan. Mom shot this.)

*** I can't resist posting more than one of these: scans from prints of shots on Mountain Productions scaff rigs in the 80's. Here's a story that needs a workup. This, ladies & gentlemen, is The World's Biggest Set of Monkey Bars. (This is the state of the art in '86 or so. It's bigger & better now.) Large steel-scaffolding constructions for staging, audio and lights including lift capacities up to thirty tons for flown production. The engineering was a kick, the play was world-class athletics flirting closely with danger, and I saw some splendid teams welded under fire and worked my grubby ass off with fine men and women who gleamed when it counted.

A glance:


Miles McCready -- one of the Core Four who ran teams around the country in '87. All-star, from top to bottom of the rig. Never a better attitude on the site than Miles and tough as nails over the long haul. This is Pink Floyd ("Delicate Sound of Thunder") going into the Carrier Dome at Syracuse University.


Headblock detailing team. Top of the rig; ninety-six feet. It's the downstage headblock; you can tell by the corner at the ledgers (the horizontally-bits). The man in the plaid shirt has no steel to his left or his front: this point would be the extreme downstage left. Again: ninety-six feet -- it pays to know one's way around the rig in 3-D space. That's my brother, Bryan, sitting on the headblock looking up, with his feet on the block beam. Steve Rongo is standing on the headblock.


Van Halen roof, Rochester, New York, 1986. Bryan, Michael, me, and two men whose names I don't know but I'm looking for.

*** Finally:


That's Boeing 747-121 N744PA "Clipper Star of the Union" -- noted here as the twenty-fifth 747 off the line. My grandfather took this photograph on May 8, 1970, barely two months after Four Papa Alpha first flew on March 3, 1970. (A family friend worked in the tower, it was the second Jumbo Jet departure from Honolulu International Airport, and he and Dad drove over there to see it.) This airplane is still flying. (Here, you can see other places it's been in its life.)