This update is a bit of a divergence from my usual breed of randomness, which typically has something to do with S/V Nomadness, development facilities, technomadic gizmology, or random noodlings triggered by any of the foregoing. I’d like to dedicate this posting to my father, Ed Roberts, who passed away in 2005. The trip to…

Read More

1972 was a strange year for me… as a geeky 19-year-old college dropout in the Air Force, I was hardly on the sort of career path that I had imagined. The Vietnam War was in full swing, and I was stationed in Mountain Home AFB, Idaho… doing avionics maintenance for the F-111 fighter aircraft. Of…

Read More

Just a moment of family history… my father was the director of the Louisville Regional Science Fair, and Derek Fort was a frequent winner with interesting model rocketry projects. This was in the Feb 21, 1969 issue of General Electric News (he was a refrigeration engineer in Building 5 at Appliance Park, and for many…

Read More

Here is a 4-minute look at the 1962 EUROPLASTIQUE expo in Paris. I was 9 years old at the time… and my father went to Europe on behalf of General Electric, where he was a refrigerator design engineer at Appliance Park in Louisville. He was a lifelong member of the Society of Plastics Engineers… and…

Read More

A small group of impossibly red Ektachrome E2 slides emerged from the Deep Archives of my life, back when I was six-going-on-seven. We drove to Massachusetts to visit my mom’s sister and her kids in Pittsfield, then out to the Cape… and from there meandered back to Kentucky via the Blue Ridge Parkway with customary…

Read More

My father, Edward H. Roberts, was a lifelong member of SPE, designing plastic parts and ice cube trays for GE Erie Works in the 1940s and moving on to household refrigeration (AP5) at Appliance Park in Louisville in the early 1950s. Among his effects was a small batch of treasures from the Society of Plastics…

Read More

Ever wonder where the aluminum ice cube tray came from? When I was a kid in the ’50s and ’60s, my father, Edward H. Roberts, was a design engineer at General Electric… first at Erie Works, then at Appliance Park in Louisville where we moved when I was about 3. Obviously, ice cube trays weren’t…

Read More

The day after they were married in New York, my parents, Phyllis and Ed, flew to Bermuda for their honeymoon. Family archives include a few treasures from this 1946 romantic adventure, and this page is devoted to them… beginning with a 16-minute home movie taken by my dad: Here was their ticket on a Pan…

Read More

8mm film by Edward H. Roberts Digitized by Steven K. Roberts August 8-13, 1946 In August of 1946, a 33-year-old GE engineer named Edward H. Roberts stepped aboard the SS Manitoba for a Lake Superior vacation cruise… using his trusty 8mm movie camera to film scenery, crew, passengers, cargo handling, other ships, and a shore…

Read More

As I digitize the massive film library of my father, Edward H. Roberts, I find lots of glimpses of events from times long past… often wishing I had been able to do this while he was still alive to answer questions. This is one of those. Through the 1940s, he actively raced his Star-class sailboat,…

Read More