BOXES 204-205: Seattle and Sheboygan.

Joe Milicia
Sep 4, 2022
8 min read

Just about anyone who has been to Seattle will recognize the lettered sign for the Pike Place PUBLIC MARKET. But I especially like the neon coffee cup, partly for the design itself but also because it seemed like a perfect symbol for the city when I visited it in March 1997. It was drizzly or rainy most of the time, though not terribly chilly; and there was a coffee shop almost literally on every downtown corner. This was just a few years after Starbucks and a couple of rival firms had become nationally known, making Seattle 'Coffee Central' in my imagination.

This is my 100th post, and I should say something about the whole project before going on to show the Seattle photos and more from Wisconsin a few months later. (Those who just want to see the pics can scroll ahead; maybe you've done so already!)

Since late 2020 I've scanned and presented just over 200 boxes of slides, spanning just over 30 years (Fall of 1965 to Summer of 1996 so far). For the first 15 years the boxes each hold about 20 slides, while the majority of the later ones hold about 36; they total almost exactly 3000 slides scanned so far. You might ask why I'm doing this.

For a long while I wanted to make digital scans of my slides, and did make some efforts using the scanning equipment on my campus. (Thanks for your help, Tom U. and JoeBot!) But it was not only time-consuming but inconvenient to spend hours on campus for just a few boxes each session. I looked over reviews of scanners to buy one for home use, but I couldn't decide upon the right cost/quality balance. Finally, the Covid lockdown of fall 2020 led me to buy a mid-priced Epson scanner.

Meanwhile--that is to say, back in 2010--I went on a trip by myself to Japan, where, to feel connected to family and friends, I wrote a nightly travel report via a group email (no photos). Folks seemed to enjoy the letters, and I enjoyed summing up my day's experiences before going to bed. I did this for some later trips to Europe, Korea and Japan, gradually adding more digital photos as the technology made it easier, though I never attempted a blog with interwoven photos. (Thanks, Sharon E. and others for showing how it could be done!). Even before I bought the Epson I had the idea that it might be fun to write a blog in which I reported on my past travels, illustrated by my freshly scanned pics. In this way I could share my past life with whoever might want to read about it or see the photos. So I set up Onemoreboxofslides.com. (Thanks, Michelle, for your invaluable instruction!)

Of course, basing my posts pretty strictly on the slides themselves, with only brief explanations of what took me to various places, means that you're seeing "my past life" in a pretty limited way. Like most people in pre-mobile-phone times, I wasn't carrying a camera during the most important events of my life--or during 'average' uneventful days either--and (unlike many of today's bloggers) wouldn't have thought to use it, let along publish the results. As you've seen if you've followed my posts, most of my slide photos were taken during travels, as my blog's subtitle says, especially if "travels" includes excursions just a few miles away from home. But there are also quite a few pics of family and friends, though I now wish I had photographed more friends in decades past. In the years when disposable cameras were popular I occasionally took snapshots but haven't attempted to scan any.

From the start I've made it a rule for my posts to include every slide photo from every box, except for blatantly bad ones I should have thrown out years ago, and for the occasional redundant photo (two shots from the same vantage point). There haven't been many of the latter--rather, I've been disappointed that I took so few photos in my younger days. (Slide film wasn't cheap--at least not on my budget.) I've enjoyed revisiting photos I've remembered fondly, and surprised to see how many I don't remember taking at all. Indeed, I've been shocked to find some photos of people whose faces, not to mention names, I don't recall at all. Of course I've also been unable to ID many a less-than-world-famous castle or church, but it's been fun to do research so that I can identify them in my posts. I'll mention one other disappointment: I found quite a larger proportion of inferior photographs than I had expected, though through cropping and other digital adjustments I've attempted to make them more presentable.

The question remains: Who would want to read these posts? They're out there for the whole online world to see, but they're hardly of world-class interest as either autobiography or photography. I do hope that some family and friends will be entertained by them, or parts of them, and that strangers might like to see a record of what certain places and people looked like between 1965 and about 2005, when I bought my first digital camera and my last slide projector broke down.

And so, after my longest digression and picture-less stretch by far, let's get back to Seattle.

First I'll show three Wisconsin shots. One afternoon in what must have been early October 1996 Anne and I went for a walk with our friend Aviva (who was programs director at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center) in the Kettle Moraine park district, near Parnell Tower. Fall colors were at their peak:

The second slide is of a sauerbraten dinner--Anne used to make this for me on my birthday, so this must be a March 1997 photo. (Those are dumplings or extra-large spaetzle next to the meat; red cabbage in the soufflé dish; and plates and cups that Anne and I had gradually collected to form a set.)

The third slide was taken a week later--as I know because I'd accidentally tapped on something that (annoyingly to me) caused the day and exact hour to be printed in a corner of the slides in this box; I've cropped it out of several of the photos below. In any case, the pic shows Michelle doing homework in front of our computer. (I don't recall using the word 'desktop' back then.)

Was our furnace broken down or was she just chilly? I have no idea, but check out that PC!

In late March I attended Norwescon, an annual Seattle-held science fiction conference where that year I was a judge for the Philip K. Dick Award for best SF paperback original. The conference was at a hotel near the airport, but since I had never been to Seattle (or anywhere in the Northwest) I flew out a few days earlier and stayed at a modest downtown hotel--a Victorian-era one on a steep street above the harbor. I arrived on a drizzly evening, but I see that my first photo of the city is of a briefly sunny morning: it shows the 48-foot-tall Hammering Man kinetic sculpture outside the Robert Venturi-designed Seattle Art Museum (barely visible on the right):

I went to the museum on a later day. but on this first morning I walked to the nearby Pike Place Market:

If I recall correctly, this diner below was within the Market:

From a terrace above the Market you could look across the Elliott Bay portion of Puget Sound toward Bainbridge Island:

My next visit was to Pioneer Square, at the heart of downtown and "old" Seattle:

The original Skid Row (where once lumber was skidded downhill to the harbor) extends up from Pioneer Square. As I walked down to the harbor I noticed this seagull posing over "its" sign:

I see that I did get to the Seattle Art Museum with its imposing stairway:

One afternoon I took a bus up to the University of Washington to see the campus. I passed by the marquee of the nearby Varsity Theatre:

That evening they were showing a recently discovered "alternate version" of the great 1946 film noir The Big Sleep, and I remember standing in a long line in pouring rain to get a ticket (well worth getting wet for, as it turned out). But during daylight I wandered through the campus, where trees were in full spring blossom:

The next day I visited Queen Anne Hill, which rises just north of Downtown. Its residential streets had plenty of blossoms as well:

In the photo just above, you see the Space Needle rising above the grounds of the 1962 World's Fair at the base of Queen Anne Hill--which by the way was named after its ornate Queen-Anne-style mansions. I didn't directly photograph any of the mansions, for some reason, but I did get record a couple of views from overlooks. One, to the east, shows Lake Union with Gas Works Park on the peninsula:

And turning to the right (south) you get this view of Downtown and the Space Needle:

I never noticed until just now that there is a cat in the foreground on the roof of a Queen Anne house. Not visible in the photo, or at least I can't find it, is the elevated track of the famous monorail that takes passengers from Downtown to Seattle Center, the World's Fair site. I greatly enjoyed riding it, and went to an excellent Seattle Symphony concert at the Opera House at the edge of the Center. but took no photos.

I did, however, record a ferry ride to Bainbridge Island one afternoon. Here's the Downtown skyline after we left the shore:

I see that I have a photo of myself on the ferry--I wonder if I took it myself with a timer or (less likely) if some other passenger offered to take a photo. In any case, I'm holding a Starbucks that I bought at the ferry's snack bar--at the time it felt very "Seattle" to be drinking it in the cool weather. Another passenger was this seagull:

My last photo of Seattle on this trip is one more of the skyline, including the Kingdome (now demolished) to the right (south) of Downtown, and what appear to be a range of mountains beyond the city:

I'll round off this post with some pics from home taken in Summer '97, though the photo to the right, of Becky and her high-school boyfriend Lucas, was taken right after the Seattle shots, probably to finish up the slide roll. The next shots are of a party when Aron graduated from high school that June. Here is the cake Anne made, along with a display of photos and his diploma:

Here's a closeup of the cake with one piece cut from it:

A buffet table was set up inside and, more unusually, another table in our side yard:

Michelle and several of her friends (including Christine on the left) were clustered on the front porch at one point:

The party spread out onto the front sidewalk:

. . . and even to across the street, where a sack race was held:

The party, with guitars, moved indoors later:

Some days later I took this photo of Michelle and Tori, the kids' former babysitter, and Tori's baby. (Pics from her 1994 wedding, though not of her or her groom, are in BOXES 189-190.) I could have cropped this picture, but want to show the original upholstery on our couch and the displays of photos and other objects we had in 1997.

For a while in the back yard there were stargazer lilies in midsummer:

One other set of pics from that summer are of the wedding of our friends Tom Uebelherr and Jane Cole, held at the Hubbard Park Lodge in Milwaukee. I wasn't able to get good photos but I'll include the best of them for the sake of the occasion. Here's the venue interior: