Beneath my desk down in our basement, there’s a Walkers Pure Butter Assorted Shortbread tin with a strip of masking tape on it. Written on the tape, in orange felt pen, is “Old Color Slides-Taiwan? +Baby Mary.” Inside are yellow boxes of Kodak 35mm slides taken (presumably, on my part) by my dad, Bob, at home while stationed in California and Hawaii and during down time while training with the Marines in Hawaii and Taiwan from mid- to late-1964, about a year before he died. There’s also a box of slides from my sister Mary’s baptism from 1958. Most of the slides were shot on Ektachrome. Mary’s baptism, however, was shot on Kodachrome.

That tin and those slides have sat in the basement for years. I finally rifled through them about six months ago, using a magnifying glass and window light to go through them (I have a loupe stashed somewhere around here, but I’ve no idea where it might be, nor the inclination to hunt it down). I had seen some of these pictures before. There are prints floating around our family that are similar to the images I ran across during my inspection this past winter. But a number of them I’d never seen before.

I know dad had a photography habit. His Minolta Autocord twin lens reflex camera—mom always called it the “portrait camera”—sits front and center among my modest camera collection in our family room. I don’t know what camera he made these Kodak pictures with, but given the times, I’m guessing he was shooting with something smallish like a Minolta rangefinder he might have picked up in Hong Kong or Japan. It looked to have a fairly fast lens, sharp, too.

I was impressed with how well the slides have held up, given the less than archival manner in which they’ve been handled the past decade or so. The colors are still quite vivid, given most are nearly as old as I am.

I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say dad was a decent shooter either, seeing his day job was prepping for war in Southeast Asia. Most of the photos are well exposed and in focus. I find the snapshots of he took of his family and those he took of his men training underscore the two very different worlds in which he lived.

There were some rather pleasant surprises among the collection like seeing pictures of mom and my Uncle Jim O’Malley as young adults. When I first saw the photo of mom and Mary, I thought, for just a moment, “Is that really mom?” And it looks as though Uncle Jimmy hadn’t been shaving for more than a year when that photo of he and Mary was taken.

I’ve shared some these photos with mom. In one of our email exchanges, she shared a story about Mary’s baptism photo that’s not the greatest endorsement of military life: “It is great to see the pictures of Mary’s baptism. We were living in WWII Quonset hut housing on Mare Island in Vallejo. The year was 1958 probably in Jan. or Feb. Bob was stationed aboard the Helena that was in dry dock for six months of repairs. The housing was the pits: mice, termites etc. Mary’s crib legs were set in large coffee cans filled with water to keep the ants from getting to her.”

I also shared my photographic find with my buddy Scott Smith back in March. In one of our back-and-forth emails, I sort of used him as a sounding board, trying to figure what do with my little discovery:

“Maybe I’ll try to cobble a blog post about dad’s slides. You had mentioned delving into memories while going through the slides. Thing is, I have no memories of my dad (he died at Chu Lai when I was three). I have other people’s memories of my dad, and I have photos of him, but no real recollection of my own of him. I guess it’s more of a distillation exercise, trying to gain some sort of insight on a 33 year-old man from some snapshots he took over 50 years ago.”

Scott’s reply to my plaint was brief, yet brilliant: “I’d forgotten how young you were when you lost your dad. Perhaps that makes these photos an even greater gift.”