BOX 4: family in Cleveland

While I was at Colgate my parents moved from the little two-story house on the southeast side of Cleveland, where I had grown up, to a ranch-style in suburban Warrensville Township. I imagine that's why I took this wide shot of my parents, my brother, Jim, and my sister, Ellen, soon after I drove home for Christmas break: to show off the house itself. (Or: I had no sense through the viewfinder of how far away everyone was standing.) Here's a second shot, this one cropped:

My father is holding the 16mm movie camera he had been using for a good 10 years. We had a projector for screening the short reels of film, mostly of Christmas mornings and summer picnics (later compiled on VHS and eventually DVD). (I must have gotten some of my love of movies from Dad, with whom I went to see double features on Wednesday and Sunday nights at the 'nabes' [a word, coined by Variety, that I didn't use until many years later] even past high school; my mother was a moviegoer too, preferring to take the kids to catch new releases on Saturday afternoons in the downtown palaces, after shopping and lunch.) Below are a couple more photos from that 'shoot,' taken from the opposite direction:

Jim, who was in the 101st Airborne, was home for the holidays. I have no idea why we were all dressed up: could we be going to or coming back from church, but then why would my father have the movie camera?

The next summer, after I had left Colgate but before moving back to NYC, my photos favored the back yard. No, Jim and Ellen didn't normally push the lawnmower together--maybe he was showing her how to use it. Our cousin Judi, who was about Ellen's age, often visited: here they are looking very mid-'60s:

And here they are separately. Don't ask me why Middlemarch is perched in the tree near Ellen's head: one of us must have been reading it and just put it aside (but in a tree?) when the photo was taken.

Every summer we went at least once to the excellent Cleveland Zoo. Here are the photos I took during our 1966 visit:

Pretty standard zoo pics, though I do like the one of Ellen and Judi waving from the flamingo pond, and at least the tiger is looking alert instead of slumped in the heat.

Jim was now out of the service, and brought home with him a young German Shepherd, named Heidi. Dog pics naturally follow:

That summer we made one excursion beyond the zoo: to Madison, WI, and the Dells, of all places, with a stop in Chicago on the way back. I'll report on the reason and show the pics in the next post.