I had an incident this past week that started me thinking about the differences between the old ways and the new ways of recording items of interest, results of competitions, favorite places to visit and discoveries from the past. A friend sent me a photo from a newspaper of an event here in town from 1975 that showed me standing on top of three chairs stacked on top of one another with a girl sitting on my shoulders. It brought back some fond memories of the crazy things I did years ago and made me marvel that I am still walking about.
I looked at an old album of photos and newspaper clippings from many years ago. In past years that was how people recorded things that they wanted to remember. My mother cut out newspaper clippings of different sports results from high school and college competitions and posted them in a scrap book. Old photos were also posted with teammates and group photos of the team.
There were photos of me running the Boston Marathon and the Chicago Marathon. Races had a photographer snapping photos of the runners as they passed his or her location. A week or two later you would get a letter in the mail with small photos of the pictures they took with a price list to buy a photo of the races. I had Robert Bermea take photos of runners at the Better Half Marathon for the runners to purchase if they wanted. Colton McWilliams, Daily Record Sports Editor, has photos of players and teams from years ago because there were photographers on the sidelines with cameras recording the event for newspapers or magazines.
The practice of keeping photo albums and scrap books is not as popular now as it was years ago. In the movie “New in Town,” a group of ladies were still keeping scrapbooks, and it brought back memories of my mother sitting at a table pasting photos of friends and relatives in a photo album or scrap book. I have my grandmother’s photo album. I don’t know many of the people in the photos, but it is interesting to see the clothes they wore and the social events that they took photos of. I recognized my parents when they were young.
With some of my album photos, I am not even sure who took the photo at various events. I have photos of a group of six runners together as we ran the San Antonio Marathon. At another marathon, we started out as a group of 15 friends and as the miles went by the group slowly diminished to where we were finally down to four and we decided to finish together. I don’t know who took the photo but it shows the four of us crossing the finish line together.
That was the old way of keeping memories alive. Today I see photos on Facebook or in a text message. It is so easy to record a memory on today’s cell phones and share a photo or a video to a friend’s computer or cell phone. It doesn’t take long before 1,000 people have seen the photo or video. I know I have photos on my cell phone that must number in the 100s of photos from trips overseas, sailing trips, friends eating lunch, papers that needed to be sent to some agency, and just everyday life around the house and town.
Will these photos stand the test of time the way my grandmother’s photos have? Will great, great grandsons be able to see what their family history was like? Unless someone in the family, or a friend, prints it out for posterity, all those photos will be lost. Drop a cell phone in the water, or drop it off a cliff, and those events are long gone.
It’s like the first child has a large photo album, the second child has a smaller album and the third child only has class photos from school for the family photo album. It makes you wonder how your history will be recorded
