It is a little disoriented here at Refuge Farm. Some boxes were opened down in the office attached to the garage spaces. There were images that had been unseen in twenty or thirty years. Some we had never seen. Is there one that includes Jane, a wife of some twenty years? As a matter of fact, yes, there is. Plus a wedding album that started that adventure.

Problem with that is the printer-scanner device is going to the trash as unusable. I have to take pictures of the pictures, which are processed and bounced off a satellite in low earth orbit to join the Google Cloud and be shared with this laptop. This montage was created from the original mostly Black & White images now some seventy years in age. They went to orbit yesterday and back. The one of Jane, the boys and me standing in front of the 1975 Olds Delta 88 sedan I bought when Dad’s lease on the vehicle ran out in 1977. It was one of my favorite vehicles, big and assertive, and it stayed in a storage unit Up North for ten years while we were out of CONUS. But that image will take another day or so to get turned around from phone in my hand held device to LEO to be accessed by the laptop on my…lap.

The little captions in the slide above attempt to capture the wonder of it. Mom and Dad are in a couple candid ones, probably from around 1948 when they were courting and married in New York City. Top right is Dad’s family at the beginning of World War Two. Grandpa James Burr Reddig appears in two of these. He is with Uncle Jim at the left, then him, sisters Rhoda and Barbara and Grandma and Grandpa. I never had a chance to meet him (1876-1944), so his life was one of a little mystery. On the bottom row he is standing at the Big Dig of the Panama Canal, where he once saw General Goethels, chief engineer of the massive project, peacefully enjoying his lunch at the Panama Club in Panama City. He boldly approached the table where the General was dining and suggested the installation of a telephone network to control the opening and closing of the locks on the Canal, rather than the semaphore flags called for in the design. The General agreed it might have some potential.

All the folks on the top row of the compiled photos are now deceased, and like Grandpa, many of them were born in the 19th century. The folks on the bottom, including the one on the left as a pretend grown-up and on the right as an oh-so-hip college student are of the author, my two sons as little guys and Grandpa as a young engineer in Panama around 1912 when the Bell System had him drumming up business on the biggest engineering project since the Egyptians built the Pyramids.

Uncle Jim, his son, was later an aeronautical engineer, among other things. He designed the first all-stainless steel float plane (The Fleetwings Seabird) plus the welding technique to hold it together. Later, he wound up specializing in space-borne imaging systems. There is a picture from the Ranger Lunar missions intended to survey potential landing sites for the Gemini manned missions to the Moon. And the pictures of the Soviet Union I used most of my professional career. We laughed about that on the back porch of the house in King’s Park West where we lived while he was still active and traveling.

The arc of technology and history cross this compilation. When visiting Uncle Jim and his family in West Webster, New York, there was an occasion to bring out some ancient film to run through an equally old projector that showed Grandpa’s return from Bermuda, where he had supervised installation of the local phone system. That film may be in Cousin Alan’s collection, but is something representative of the times. Few “family films” exist from the 1920s, and the sight of Grandpa in a Solar Topee sun helmet looks like something from the British Raj. That transitioned through time to the 8mm cameras every family had. We don’t see much of that, but there are tall stacks in the garage containing dozens of circular slide trays to display memories in large light-borne squares on a screen unfurled at the end of the family room.

In fact, equipping most of the billions of us humans with video imaging systems has changed our societies. Like the pictures labeled “Lunch.” Or, in the case of this morning, “Outrageous incident in New York subway!”

So, the piles of hundreds of the old images stored for decades in the garage are being imaged in part to save a quick view of ancient times. Now, they start as digital things that leap in that ones-and-zeroes format from computer to computer. In future times things will be a bit different. Instead of old B&W squares on shiny paper, the strings of numbers apportioned in old disused electronic devices will be invisible without bringing the machines back to life. There is a stack of those devices, now dust covered and absent the original equipment power cords. They may be stored in un-labeled tangles in other unidentified boxes or cast aside years ago.

There is a question, of course. And that is what to do with the digital stuff. Unless printed and stored, they will all go away. Ubiquitous when the phone is charged and operating on the current operating system. Invisible when that time comes so quickly.

So, in the meantime, there are those people who once lived and now do not. They have been invisible for quite a while, and appear to you this morning until you sigh, say “those Socotras” and click rapidly to something else. Technology flies, doesn’t it?

Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com