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My dad’s little photo album from the 1940s

About 14 months ago, my mom presented me with an old binder bulging with photos. I looked through them, and figured out it was a photo album my dad had kept in the 1940s.

It wasn’t comprehensive—there were, for instance, photos of my dad from his military service that were not in this little album—but it certainly contained photos of him and by him that I’d never before seen.

Some of the pictures were starting to show signs of deteriorating. Why wouldn’t they? They were 60-70 years old!

I scanned every photo in the little album. I lightly retouched about a quarter of them, removing dust and scratches and some corrosion that had started to appear. And I thought the best thing for them, since they involve my dad and family and the events of his day, would be to post them.I captioned a handful of them.

I’m mindful of the fact that my dad never showed these photos, and the intent certainly isn’t to invade anybody’s privacy or circumvent their wishes. Rather, it’s to share with family and others to whom these photos might be significant memories of another century.

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I’m not sure who many of the people in these photos are. I’m also not sure where many of them were taken. My dad served in the U.S. Army Air Corps from 1941-45. One of the photos indicates, in his handwriting, that he was in the 29th Bomb Squadron, which seems to be one of the units listed in a Latin American deployment that matches many of the places he’d occasionally talk about—like the Panama Canal Zone and the Galapagos Islands off of Ecuador. My father also spoke occasionally of having been hospitalized for at least several months in New Zealand for malaria during the war, but there are no pictures included of that.

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  • Jim Ostroff January 11, 2012, 7:08 pm

    A most wonderful testament to a very special man and to a the millions of people who fought in War II.

  • Royal Calkins January 11, 2012, 11:23 pm

    The resemblance, you to him, is so striking. Thanks for sharing. Way cool

  • YMC January 13, 2012, 8:34 am

    I like the pix. Important time in our history! Thanks for sharing!