BOXes 8-9: fall in Connecticut, winter in ohio

Like every other Midwesterner, I'd heard about the sensational fall colors of New England (thanks to word of mouth as well as tourist boards and The Trouble With Harry). But I'd been to Boston only in other seasons, and autumn in upstate New York wasn't much different from Ohio. The legends were real, I found out, when I took a train up from Manhattan one weekend to visit two Colgate friends who were now living in Connecticut. Toni and John were Master's candidates when I arrived at Colgate in 1964, and they had visited me in Ohio in August 1965 (I can date it by the fact that we saw Help! when it was newly released). They now had teaching jobs and were living in a farmhouse near Danbury.

On the ride up to Connecticut I couldn't resist taking less-than-professional pictures from the train window with my less-than-a-year-old Instamatic--as I would continue to do during longer trips via every form of transportation except horseback. This time I took only two shots: of Harlem and the Harlem River, familiar views to anyone taking a train north from Grand Central Station:

I was pretty dazzled by the sights as soon as my friends picked me up at the station. Unfortunately my slides, as scanned, don't do justice to the colors, but maybe they convey some of my excitement:

The last picture above is of Toni and John's farmhouse. I seem to recall there were chickens, though I didn't try to 'shoot' them. My friends' willing-to-pose cats were another matter:

And here are my hosts. I was still trying to learn how to take pictures of people that weren't stiff stand-in-front-of-the-camera portraits--that looked spontaneous or 'candid' without looking like the camera had gone off by mistake. Here are my two favorite shots:

The others from that visit have issues with available light or contain unremovable (with my equipment) redeye or scratches, but each has something I like, such as the coziness of the living room/hearth with Toni, and the reminder in the apple-barrels shot that this was the first time I'd ever tasted fresh-pressed cider, quite a revelation. The low-angle view of Toni was a result of my trying to get her and her cat in one 'artistic' shot: naturally the cat was impatient or my finger was too slow,

For the sake of completeness (except for a couple of out-of-focus shots), I'll throw in two more pics, one of me and one of a twilight scene that might charitably be called moody:

My other long-distance travel that fall was to Cleveland for Christmas with the family. My brother, now home from the Service, had recently become the owner of a young German shepherd named Heidi. My only photos from that trip are of Heidi, with Ellen prominent in a couple of shots (looking through a back-porch screen in one):

I'd flown to Cleveland, and when returning I took quite a few photos from the plane window. I hadn't flown many times, and I was still enjoying the newness of taking pictures with my very own camera: these are my only excuses for taking the sort of photos that countless others have taken, though probably few have seen fit to publish. I do think there's a certain beauty in the patterns and colors of these wintery scenes (shown in chronological order), but I certainly understand your bypassing them!

Besides the Central Park walk I documented in the previous BOX, I took a number of other strolls around parts of Manhattan with friends that year, and moved into a new apartment at the end of January 1967. More on that in the next post.