Taking pictures on vacation or other travel is pretty standard practice, especially these days when there’s no film to buy or developing and printing to pay for.
But the pictures with this blog are a different story. They’re from nearly 60 years ago, when I was a young teenager, living temporarily in Heidelberg, Germany, where my father was assigned with the U.S. Army.
We took advantage of that to travel around quite a bit, and I had just moved on from a box camera to a pre-war Agfa folding camera and a somewhat unreliable Weston light meter. Film was almost always black-and-white, and processing was mostly home-done; only the occasional color roll went to the PX.
I hadn’t looked at these pictures for many years, although some of them are vivid memories. But I’ve recently been digging through my ‘shoebox’ of pictures—which is actually seven DVDs of scanned photos—sorting pictures of family and friends. Randomly mixed among them, I found these, all from late 1959 into 1960. They include pictures from Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris and Venice.
This was the only color image I selected; most of the others, unfortunately, suffered fading. The canals were fascinating to me, evidently: they account for most of my Amsterdam pictures.
But I did find time to record a souvenir stand stocked with all the usual, including hundreds of pairs of uncomfortable wooden shoes and a half-shaved mannequin. And a family of Dutch children who wanted to know, if I remember correctly, why I was taking a picture of their street.
On the way home, we passed working windmills. On more recent visits, I’ve been told that they’ve all been motorized or museum-ized. Hope that’s not really true!
We got to Belgium a year and change after the end of Expo ’58, Belgium’s big World’s Fair, but the first thing I wanted to see was the Atomium, the fair’s symbol. It’s a giant enlargement of an iron molecule: 165 million times life size.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t open to the public then, but today it is, and operates as a museum. That’s the Belgian Royal Library below, inscribed in both French and Flemish.
Venice was also on our first year’s travel. We arrived on a day when the water buses, the vaporetti, were on strike, and so were the regular passenger gondoliers. My father, who spoke no Italian, somehow managed to negotiate a ride with a boatman who had just finished unloading vegetables near the Rialto Bridge.
He took us on an extended tour of the canals, avoiding most of the major tourists spots. We’ve always wondered whether it was because of the strike, or whether it was just because he wanted more opportunities to stop and shout at friends to look at him, with his cargo of passengers, while he mimed playing a mandolin like a ‘real’ gondolier!
Even the individual water taxis were tied up in solidarity. Below, our ride heads home after dropping us off near the hotel. And then, as now, there are crowds at Saint Marc’s.
1960 was also the year of my first visit to probably my favorite city (except for home): Paris. My sister and mother stayed home; it was only of the few times I ever traveled alone with my father, who had business at NATO headquarters, which was still in Paris then. I had hours on my own, and with a French friend who had attended my school in Kansas.
There were many more pictures, I’m sure there were…and there certainly have been since!
