While I am doing work at home during the current crisis, the limits of the possible permit me to spend time doing other things. There is yardwork–a war of its own perhaps to be mentioned in another time.
For now, I have countless 35mm slides in our basement. So, I thought it might be fun to bring them into the digital world. I will try to do this mostly chronologically, but expect diversions.
I don’t know that I will have any deep thoughts here. Just reflections on memorable moments, moments illuminated by this long idle slide collection.
Part One: Father and Mother (Isa ja Ema) in the 1950s.
The collection, so far the earliest I have identified, contain a few images of my father and mother at times and places I remained home–an early latch key kid–another story I have toyed with.
The story I have told up to now has been of Ema’s devotion to me and to our mutual survival. As well, I have talked of Isa’s later arrival and his reunion with Ema and his pursuit of higher education and professional work in the United States. The image below shows the two together, with other Estonians at a small celebration of some kind–a marriage, a birthday, an anniversary? I’d bet on the former: flowers, champagne, a corsage of two.
For Isa, the early years in the United States involved work–eventually leading to a profession he had not been interested before the war. Music would have been his profession in Estonia. In the United States it turned elsewhere, work as a draftsman, schooling toward advanced degrees in civil engineering, and eventually computer programming early in the IT revolution. Below are two images that I can only speculate suggest an interest in the 50s in Columbia University, which had a major architecture program. Instead, he would eventually enter an eight-year night program at Cooper Union leading to a degree in engineering. It was a tuition-free program; Columbia’s would not have been. (Columbia rejected my application in 1961.)
Visible in the image above to the right of the Lowe Library is St. John the Divine Episcopal Church, a magnificent edifice that I would visit in 2019 when I participated in that event. Below during a lovely spring, Isa.
Another view of Isa is in a visit to Battery Park. I imagine the view of the Statue of Liberty from there would have held great meaning in those early days of his life in New York. Fortunately, he did not live to see the television advertisements of the insurance company, Liberty Mutual, that have trivialized the great monument.
And finally, in this portion, I offer an image of Isa in front of the under-construction New York Coliseum at Columbus Circle in New York. The highly controversial project went up during 1954–56. I can only guess that at that point Isa was working for a drafting firm that had some share of responsibility for the project. One can’t say it would be lasting monument to anything. By 1986 it was gone. I remember it from the its years of existence as a destination for a pair of adolescent friends from the Bronx out to see the latest at the annual automobile show. The coliseum was also a feature of our journeys to New York Ranger hockey games at Madison Square Garden, just ten blocks down the street from the Columbus Circle subway station. That, too, would evaporate later, its name moved to a structure at Penn Station a mile south.
