I’ve mentioned before that my father was usually the photographer in our family. That means there aren’t too many pictures of him taken on his camera. Occasionally, someone would snap a photo of him, but many of the pictures we have of him were taken by rank amateurs and are blurry or poorly framed or otherwise not worth keeping.
A picture of my kids at Mt. Rainier National Park, summer 1994, taken by my father
I was looking for pictures of my father to use for a Father’s Day post. I came across a random roll of snapshots in a box of snapshots I threw together when my siblings and I were dividing what we found after his death. The envelope for this roll of film is labeled “’94 New Orleans Jamie/Marcy Visit.”
A picture of my mother, summer 1994, taken by my father. Was this in New Orleans?
Well, that meant the roll of film was taken on at least two different occasions, because my kids never visited New Orleans with my parents in 1994. Many of the photos have date stamps in 1994, so at least the year on the label is correct. And some of the photos are of my kids, so that part of the description is correct also. A couple of the pictures look like they might have been taken in New Orleans, but I can’t be sure.
One picture is of my dad with a fish in his hands.
My dad, summer 1994. Successful fishing day.
That’s the picture that actually inspired this post. Dad loved to fish. I don’t know when he first went fishing, but I assume it was sometime when he was a kid. Maybe when he spent time with his grandparents in Arnold, Nebraska.
Many years later, after he was retired, he went to Alaska for deep-sea fishing. He brought back the maximum in halibut and salmon. His prowess with a pole meant all his friends and relations ate well.
I can remember fishing with Dad during summer vacations in Washington and Oregon when I was about six or seven. I didn’t enjoy it and didn’t go often. It always seemed to be cold and rainy. And early. One time I slipped on a creek bank and fell in, soaking my shoes and pants.
We kids were too noisy for my father. He wanted to catch the fish, not scare them away. And he didn’t want to babysit children while he was fishing. At least we used fish eggs as bait—I could handle those on my own, which I probably wouldn’t have done had we used worms.
It appears in this picture that Dad caught a fish he was proud of. The photo is date-stamped 8-2-94, and I assume that date is accurate. I don’t know where it was taken. It looks like it might have been at Sunriver in Oregon, which is on the Deschutes River. My parents frequently vacationed there.
I went mining for information on where my parents might have been in August 1994, but I didn’t get very far. My mother kept a journal in which she reflected on daily Bible readings. The journal covered 1994, but she rarely noted where she was when she wrote. No helpful data there.
My family went to Sunriver with my parents and other family members one summer, but I don’t think it was in 1994. I have an old videotape of movies my dad took labeled “Vacations 1993” and I think our Sunriver trip is on that tape. But I can’t watch the tape to be sure, because we no longer have a VCR in the house.
So the mystery of when my dad caught this fish will remain unsolved. But in writing this post, I’ve had the pleasure of chuckling over my disgraced tumble into a creek as a child, and of thinking of a family reunion in Sunriver many years later when my kids were about the same age as when I fell in.
And I’ve remembered Dad’s love of fishing, and missed him again on Father’s Day.
What random family pictures do you have that you wish you could identify by time or place?
