So, this represents some of the redecorating going on at the East Wing of Big Pink. You will note the variety of old black-and-white (hope that term isn’t cultural appropriation) on the shelf below the 72″ Television:

Grace had a bunch of hers she wanted to display- not unusual in a family with 9 siblings- and they go from the extreme right to the middle. She had seen the boxes of jumbled old photos from individual collections over the years in my swindling series of junk boxes. I grabbed a couple handfulls of my old unordered junk and found some that had passed mostly unseen over the years. This is three of Dad’s family in a pile of old snaps:

Upper of those is Dad’s family, my Aunt and Grandmother on the beach at lower left. A few years later Dad waits on the family porch in the lower right. That was not all that showed up, of course. There were some others, including three “unedited proof” images that startled me. They were taken in 1972 as part of the University of Michigan Chi Phi Fraternity’s annual update for that year’s House collective image. I looked at them, vaguely recalling we all knew we were about to start life with graduation in ’73. We would then have to figure out how to live in the “real” world. I think we were deliberate in having our pictures at the most extreme version of social fashion we would be likely to be permitted:

Whew!

Then two years with McGraw-Hill, leaving after an interesting social experiment that succeeded and failed in a grand attempt at adulthood. I had $10K in the bank, a not-inconsiderable then-amount of personal cash, and traveled for two years to visit pals and see some things we were not smart enough to know were actually supposed to be on the bucket list.

When I was down to a few hundred in the bank, I looked around for work ad saw more of the publishing stuff. On a whim, I stopped at a Nay recruiter to see if they would teach me to fly. They didn’t have anything in that direction for quotas, but recruiter LT Dan Erndal did have something for “air intelligence.” I didn’t think much about it but it sounded interesting. I signed. The rest, as they say, is history.

JR

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