CHRISTMAS … 1961

My brother-in-law who lives in Connecticut, came across this picture recently and sent it on to me. That’s me, my husband and our three children in our apartment on West 94th Street in NY City. It was our Christmas card picture for 1961.

As soon as I saw the photo the memories started flooding in. I remember the layout of that apartment. It had a large living room, two bedrooms, two baths, a small study, a dining room and a kitchen.

You’d think that would be more than enough room for our family of 5 but my husband was a free lance industrial photographer and we’d turned one of the bedrooms into a studio and office and the bathroom into a darkroom. We needed the dining room because client dinners were a necessity so that left the small study for the children. It was crowded but they loved it.

I often wonder what my husband would think of photography today. I remember all the equipment he’d tote with him … strobe lights, wires, 3 or 4 different types of cameras, tripods, etc. He would then come home and we would spend hours and hours developing film, cropping and printing photos and then washing the prints in the bathtub. We would then hang them up to dry (using clothespins !) on the lines we’d strung across the studio.

Kind of a Rube Goldberg set-up to be sure but the results were pretty amazing and it kept us in rent money ! Ah … to be that young again !!