Taking liberties (with Les's film, that is).

Les Gediman sent some of us a few rolls of mystery film to develop a

while back. I got mine in the mail yesterday afternoon, and ran a

roll last night. I picked out a few frames from the first roll to

share here. Looks like Niagra, to me. Les can do the commentary when

he sees these.<div></div>

#2<div></div>

#3<div></div>

Is the last picture of Toronto tower thingy? I hav bin up something like that. Horrible it was when the lift thing shot up the spike bit at the top. Could not wait to get down.

Yes defnitely Niagara. I think the US falls (Canadian are the horseshoe shaped falls). The park looks familiar too.

 

I think the tower is the Skylon which had (has) a revolving restaurant that my uncle owned in some sort of partnership. My parents grew-up within spitting distance of Niagara.

Skylon is in Niagara Falls. CN Tower is in Toronto, and is much, much higher.

Thanks Dean for developing some of my exposed but undeveloped rolls of film. I just mailed you a thank you note moments before seeing this post. In it, I encouraged you, as the first to soup one of the rolls, to pick out a few and share them with others in Photonet. And so you did, without a nudge.

As to the camera that took these photos, that is a mystery. To place it in time, I'm quessing it was shortly after I retired from GTE in the fall of 1989. My wife and I visited her newly discovered relatives in Falmouth, Ontario. We drove from Framingham MA and stopped in Niagra Falls going up there and coming home. We were very impressed. All the photos, movies and documentaries we've seen of Niagra Falls couldn't transmit the awe of being there. Same goes for the Grand Canyon, which was truly breath taking.

 

Back to the camera, it could have been a pre-70s camera. At that time, I primarily used my Canon SRLs, but for back up I always took a rf. I had a Canonette QL-17 GIII, an Olympus 35SP, Minolta HiMatic and Konica 35. I gave Dean and two other photonetters at least 1 roll of 120 to each participant in my "help me soup old film." That camera would have been my Rollei E3.5 Planar and is definitely pre-1970.

 

Thanks again, Dean, for helping out. BTW, I have more old film if anyone else feels like being surprised to see what's on a mystery roll of film.

 

Les

Wow! As one who was born, raised and graduated from Niagara Falls High School, NY, I was thrilled to see the photos. Definately Niagara Falls. By the way, the correct spelling is Niagara, not Niagra, just like Viagara with an N. The first photo of the falls was taken from the Canadian side and shows the America falls, with the much smaller Bridal Veil Falls at the right side. Further to the right (outside of the picture and not shown) are the Canadian Falls aka the Horshoe Falls, over which flows 3/4 of the water. Thanks for the display.

Mike, As I believe you have similar roots, I thought you may know the area from where my wife's relatives came from. It's a small town in present day Slovakia named Nova Lehota, but was also known in the past by its German and Hungarian names (Neuhau and Ujgyarmat, resp.)

When my in-laws were born in 1903- before Czechoslovakia existed- it was northern Hungary and they were subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Claudia (born Simone Laszlop in Paris in 1927) never saw her ancestral hometown till the mid 1990s when we went there twice. It's in the low Tatras and beautiful. It's northeast of Bratislava-- the capital of Slovakia which is very close to Vienna. It's very near Handlova.

Correction: The town in Ontario where my wife's relatives live is Chatham, not Falmouth! I knew it was the same name as one of the coastal towns in Cape Cod, MA. I somehow mixed up the two names. I should have remembered Chatham because my father was stationed at the Lighter than Air US Naval Base in Chatham,MA during WW1. Incidently, many times mail would be slow in getting to Ontario from Europe. It invariably went to Cape Co, MA first.

 

Just for the heck of it, I'll add a photo that was definitely taken with a pre-70 camera.<div></div>

That's a terrible scan of the photo of my father in WW1. It was one of my first prints I ever scanned. It wasn't appropriate and got way OT from Dean's prints of my trip to Niagra Falls. But, for closure , I'll look for original 1918 sepia print and rescan it. It's not nearly as fuzzy as my scanned attachment.

Les has had a look at these, so here's a page that you can load up to see what is on the rest of the first roll. I didn't spend much time on post scan processing, so there is a little dust, and the grain shows up on this particular film quite a bit. Just so y'all can see what Les was shooting back then (whenever it was). Don't know if the 35mm was shot any time near the 120 Les sent me, but the 120 (not processed yet) is marked in ASA. None of that new fangled iso stuff.

 

<a href="http://home.rmci.net/deanw/Les_1.html">first roll</a>

Another side note: I know the marine engineer that designed the maid of the mist ships pictured in the second group of shots.

 

My Great-Grandfather was a calvary officer in the Austro-Hungarian army and fought in WWI. After the war, he changed from the Germanic name Krarr to the common Hungarian name Kovacs (Ko-vach), and continued a career in the Hungarian army. My dad has photos of him in his uniform and on horseback, some very formal with the feathered cap and the long riding boots.

 

My father (and parents) emmigrated to Canada in the mid 50's, hungry refugees from postwar Germany. Eventually my dad's grandparents came too.

 

I looked for Falmouth as I've never heard of it and came up empty. Chatham is less than an hour's drive away from my home.

Mike, Big coincidence! The father of Claudia's first cousin from Chatham,Ontario, who was unknown to her before 1990s was also a cavalry cfficer in Austro-Hungarian army in WW1 and we have a photo of young Lucas Schnurer in uniform. He went alone to Canada before WW2 sending money to his family in Neuhau (now Nova Lehota)to pay off their house. Neuhau was an enclave of 90% German settlers.

 

Claudia's father was born in Budapest where "Z" was added to his parent's German name Laslop. All his siblings were born in Neuhau and kept the original spelling. Her other grandparents were Weber and Hinko. They lived in the region called Hauerland since the 14th century, always speaking German, albeit in a dialect developed over the centuries. When WW2 broke out all communications with Lucas' family were suspended until after the war. His wife and three daughters emmigrated to Canada as soon as they could get their papers approved which took many years. Young girls that he left behind in the old country were adults by the time they got to Canada.

 

In Paris, as a small child Claudia's parents spoke to her in Karpatendeutsch, their German dialect, and she gradually responded more and more in French, as she integrated with Parisian playmates and schoolmates. In Karlsruhe in 1995 we went to the 50th anniversary of the expulsion of all Carpathenian Germans back "home" to Germany after 6-7 centuries-- as a result of the Potsdam Treaty. Ironically, I was the one who translated what her compatriots were saying to Claudia. My knowledge of German was based on my memory of 3 years of studying it at high school in 1940-43 and a seminar of German 1 at Framingham Sate College taken just prior to our trip to Slovakia, or was it still Czechoslovakia in 1995? Somehow it worked out and no one was more surprised than I was that I understood rather well what they were saying, which fortunately was in standard German and not in dialect. Not surprising considering they had lived 50 years in Germany and their kids no longer spoke the old dialect. They still speak it amongst themselves. That made it easier for me to carry on a reasonable conversation with the cousins in Germany. The relatives in Chatham speak English, but when we exchange Christmas and Easter greetings they write in German and I respond in kind.

 

It would be a toot to find out your two families are related. Where did your family come from in Czechoslovakia? Her cousin in Chatham is Mary Hepner nee/geborn Schnu"rer.

There is also a Chatham in New Brunswick ("Neue Braunschweig")

but no obvious coincidences, unless one were to dig. The world

is full of 'em, and after 45 years I am used to people saying

things like, "So, you worked in Singapore! Did you know X?" (I

did).

 

Or "Johannesburg, hey?...I lived there once, in [the same townhouse

complex where I now live]", etc etc.

 

In another case, the surveyor general of Zimbabwe walked into my

office in Jo'burg and found out that I was "from overseas". So

he said, naively, "Do you know Ted [whomever]?". And I did. Sat

on the other side of a cubicle from me in a small town on

the Atlantic seaboard.

 

Camera collecting has also produced such coincidences...for another

time and another thread.

 

M.

They say: "there's nothing as old as yesterday's (news)paper." And so it is with threads in this forum after a day or two. Nonetheless, I feel the obligation to put up a better scan of my father as a sailor.

Before I could find the original 1918 print to re-scan, George Bogumirskas offered to make a new and improved scan from a higher resolution scan I sent him some time ago. He knew about the earlier scan I attached above and not only improved my poor scan, but he even took out of cracks in the copy made from the only existing print. He honored my father as an another ex-serviceman from another war (the Vietnam Conflict.)

 

In the Army Air Corps in WW2, I never saw anyone standing guard duty with a side arm and a carbine. Maybe the navy did it differently, but I doubt it. I'm guessing it was a staged shot for his girl friends; he didn't marry my mother till 1922.

 

Wonder what camera was used?<div></div>