Christmas ZOOM!

The scanning and cleaning of my family's photo archive continues. Since liberating the multitude of photos from their albums a couple of months ago, I’ve been slowly working my way through the process of scanning and touching up each individual photo. I’m moving chronologically through the rows and rows of my personal history. I finished the stack of photos from 1973 earlier this week. As I whittled down the pile, I was surprised to find this gem among the Christmas pictures… my sister with The ZOOM Catalog I wrote about last month! I didn’t realize she got that as a Christmas gift. Weird how these various artifacts keep intersecting.

And note that the book didn't arrive with the coveted ZOOM sticker already affixed to the cover.

I’ve Got the Fever

I’m the first to admit that I’m not a gamer, but I have photographic evidence that between December 1981 and April 1982, 11-year-old me was stricken with Pac-Man Fever.

That’s me on Santa’s lap sporting my Pac-Man t-shirt (and some surprisingly high-waisted jeans) at the annual Lion’s Club Christmas Party.

And there I am three months later in my Houston Oilers bathrobe holding that most coveted of Easter gifts: Pac-Man for the Atari 2600!

The Comic Book Kid

I feel like I’m rediscovering all kinds of hidden gems as I go through my immediate family’s old photos. And now there’s this. I swear if I had remembered this picture existed three years ago, it would be somewhere on the cover of my book Deus ex Comica: The Rebirth of a Comic Book Fan! I had completely forgotten that my mom had made this for me. And, embarrassingly, I have no idea where it might be today. (Sorry, Mom.) But, man, how awesome is this?!

Christmas morning, 1984. I’m 14 years old and deep into comic reading and collecting. I didn’t ask for this, but I remember my mom doing a lot of this kind of chicken scratch embroidery. (We had a table runner made of the same brown gingham at the time.) Mom had left a loop at the top, and Dad got me a dowel rod to slip through to hang it in my room, where it resided for quite a few years after this.

When Tracy and I cleaned and purged in our basement last summer, this was not among my stuff. Think this might call for an excursion into my parents’ basement and my childhood closet to see if it can be located, and then I can properly pass the mantle of “The Comic Book Kid” on to my kiddo.

A Mid-’60s Smoker’s Haven

I remember pipes and pipe racks and ashtrays around the house throughout my childhood. I can still see the vacuum-sealed tobacco canister on the floor by the loveseat and remember my fascination with the uniquely designed mechanism to pop the lid open. There was the rubber change-purse-meets-woopie-cushion styled tobacco pouch on the end table. But more than anything else, I remember the smell of L.L. Bean cherry pipe tobacco. It was the smell of my dad and his clothes. It was the smell of the family room. It was the smell of home.

From sometime around 1964 or ’65, I found this amazing photo of my dad taken at Smokers’ Haven, a specialty tobacconist in Columbus, Ohio. My dad picked up the pipe smoking habit while attending Ohio State University, and continued to smoke until the mid-’90s. He would stop in at Smokers' Haven after he’d left Columbus and moved back to Northeast Ohio – sometimes even making special trips down just to visit the shop.

Smoking sucks. I know that. (And I don’t believe my dad’s pipe smoking had any influence on my eight-year, pack-a-day cigarette smoking habit back in the day.) I remember my sister doing a project for school, maybe in middle school, where she tried to get my dad to quit smoking. She didn’t succeed, and I don’t know why my dad ultimately kicked the habit. I do know that when he did quit he sold his pipe collection and used the money to buy my mom a tennis bracelet. It was years, however, before my mom found out that was where he got the money to buy it for her.

Archiving the Past

One of my projects for this year is to rescue all my family’s photos, organize them, and scan them into the computer. I say “rescue” because back in the ’80s my parents put our photos into those magnetic photo albums... you know, the kind with the subtly tacky pages that, combined with the static of the plastic overlays, kept your photos in place on the page. Of course, what we didn’t know then is just how damaging those pages are to photo paper. My mom and dad had five large albums with photos arranged primarily in chronological order, beginning with their wedding shower in 1962 and carrying through the mid-’80s. I was able to successfully save all but three of the photos. There was one page that just wouldn’t give up the goods. All the other photos were extracted over the course of a week with varying degrees of success – the most common violation being some portion of the backing paper staying with the album page. They are, however, in good enough condition to be saved and, certainly, to be scanned.

It was a trip for me to just see each and every photo as I liberated them from their albums. The nostalgia factor amped up considerably and nudged my creative juices into overdrive as well. I suspect over the course of the coming months, there will be more than one or two blog entries inspired by the memories evoked or weird associations with the images as I work through the long process of scanning each photo, making any corrections to it in the photo software, and organizing both the digital files and the physical photos for long-term archiving.

I’m fortunate to still have both of my parents around and geographically close for all the obvious reasons, including helping me identify people and places and dates in all these photos. Once I get through this Besenyodi nuclear family era, I will probably ask my parents for the photos that never made it into albums -- those of previous generations and those of the family after my sister and I moved on and made them empty nesters.

Flashback

My mom emailed me the other day and said she found some pictures I might get a kick out of, so the next time we got together she laid this gem on me…


Christmas Morning, 1981. I was 11 and, clearly, a Miami Dolphins fan (My dad is quick to remind me that I was fond of going around saying “It's not your Miami Dolphins, it's "My-ami Dolphins!” during this period. Also, I remember I had a Miami Dolphins helmet radio that was pretty darn cool.). But if you can get past that, you might notice my barely-containable grin competing with my glasses for the honor of being named Predominant Facial Feature. Oh, and then there is the reason for that smile… My Atari 2600. If you’ve read Deus ex Comica, you know this was my first and only console system until we got a Nintendo Wii for the family for Christmas 2007. I’m holding Asteroids, and the Atari box is helping prop up my Space Invaders and Breakout game boxes.

A few years ago (before we got the Wii), I picked up an Atari Flashback 2, one of those systems that has 40 vintage games preloaded and includes a pair of Atari joysticks. It was dirt cheap and we don’t play it a lot, but I enjoy playing (and reliving) Asteroids, Centipede, Missile Command, and Pitfall every now and again. Those were the games I loved as a kid.

Back in the day, Pitfall eventually became my favorite game for the Atari 2600, but Asteroids was probably the perfect game for the console. Simple concept but surprisingly challenging. Uncomplicated graphics that were perfect for the dawn of gaming.

Yeah, I’m a child of the ‘80s.