Me I'm Just A Lucky Guy...

Our daughter Leah, son Ben, and soon-to-be-daughter-in-law Megan (aka "Number 3") with our niece Olivia.

Beatles fans will recognize the title as a line from the middle eight of Things We Said Today.

Taken with bounce flash in Mom's dining room against an off-white wall.

Opa and Ben

Here's my favorite photo of my my late father and Ben. I took it in February 1992, when Ben was not quite six years old.

What prompted me to get this one out and scan it is that Ben finished his very last day of school this past Thursday (classes, at least - finals are this week.) I asked him to have someone take his photo on campus so that I could pair it with the one Sandy took of him on his first day of kindergarten. While I was looking for that picture, I found this one just a few pages later in Sandy's well-organized photo album.

Back in '92, I had considered myself no longer a photographer, but simply a family snapshooter. I used a succession of auto-focus rangefinders that I bought for Sandy, my "good cameras" having been long before sold off.

But every once in a while, the photographer in me would come out, and this was one of those times. I had visualized this photo earlier in the day, knowing that Grandma and Opa were coming to visit. I got out my dusty, little-used Nikon EM and had Dad and Ben pose for just a few seconds.

I'll take some of the credit for this photo but not by any means all of it - the lion's share is thanks to the loving bond between Dad and his grandson.

The Mini-Cooper of Tanks

Ben came "home" to celebrate a friend's birthday, and I suggested that rather than taking the bus back to Philly Saturday night, I'd drive him back on Sunday.

On the way up US 95, I decided to make an impromptu visit to the Army Ordinance Museum at Aberdeen Proving Grounds. I'd taken the kids when they were quite small, so long ago that Ben doesn't remember the trip.

Here, Ben stands by a French Hotchkiss H35 Light Tank, a machine that may have been as dangerous to its operators as to the enemy. But newly renovated in that very cool paint scheme, Ben thought it would be nice for tooling around Philly.

Update 7/8/2008: Whoops, I insulted this tank - but not by much. It's actually a Renault R35. Why does it not surprise me that the French made crappy pre-war tanks?

Quackers - Riding the DUKW in Philly

Sandy, Mom and I headed up to Philly yesterday to visit our babies, Leah and Ben (now 26 and 22.) The kids wanted to go on a "Ride the Ducks" tour of Philadelphia for their recent birthdays, so that's what we did.

The "Ducks" are really WWII DUKW amphibious trucks - you can read all about them here. Several cities, including Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, and Bramson have commerical operations that take people on street-and-water tours. The Philly tour is excellent at 70 minutes long, with 20 minutes in the Delaware river.


Here, another DUKW off our starboard bow passes under the Ben Franklin Bridge as we head back to shore. Now, if you imagine the bridge not being there, the DUKW painted in olive drab, the sunshade gone, the DUKW being full of troops instead of tourists, hundreds more DUKWs instead of just the one, the weather being much, much worse, the water much choppier, shells exploding all around, and machine gun fire raking the water, why it would be just like D-Day.

As a child of the late '50s and '60s, I'm a big Three Stooges fan. So you can bet I was impressed when our DUKW tour guide pointed out the birthplace of Louis Feinberg, aka Larry Fine.

Being, to borrow a phrase from John McCain, "old as dirt," I actually saw the stooges, including Larry, live in 1962 at Gwynn Oak Amusement Park in Baltimore. The Stooges by then were already in their 60's but put on a fully animated show for us kids that, to our delight, showed no respect for their age.

Nyuk-nyuk-nyuk-nyuk-nyuk!