I have long been a Ken Burns fan. I own his “jazz” series and is the type of material that I will watch every six months or so.
His new documentary, The War, examines the WWII from the perspective of 4 communities (one in Minnesota) and has been playing on PBS this week. Burns and PBS offer some great resources related to the program – one component of this site offers resources for educators.
My father was stationed in the south pacific during the war as a radar operator. When I was a kid, I found an old radio in the attic that could search the ham radio frequencies. Dad knew Morse code from his military days and he would sit in the bedroom with me and write down the morse code conversations I would find. I remember he always printed in capital letters when he did this and this was not the way he normally wrote.
The images in the Burns videos made me remember my dad. A big personal regret I have had in the last few years was that I had basically ruined a large collection of negatives my dad had brought back from the war. I became aware of the lost potential of these negatives when Cindy was working on her history project and the Burns material reminded me again. My dad was an amateur photographer and also a bit of an entrepeneur. He had a 620 camera and took black and white pictures. A 620 negative is large enough to contact print (it is about the size of a snapshot and you don’t need an enlarger). He took pictures and sold small collections to his buddies so they could send pictures home. There was a shoe box full of these pictures in the attic (I did spend a good deal of time exploring the stuff in the attic.). My dad helped me take and develop pictures and I also printed some of his pictures from the war. I was not particularly careful and he did not put a lot of personal value on the negatives. Over time the collection was kind of depleted and somehow disappeared. What a resource the collection would be now!
We worry about leaving our kids money. That was the way my dad was. You can always make more money. Once the pictures are gone, they are gone forever.
