Early Years

This is a throwback to 5th grade… my first science fair project, setting the tone for the next six years during which these were the only academic things that mattered. This AC induction magnet was not my design, but the fabrication and tinkering was hugely educational… I disassembled a transformer to harvest the laminations, then…

My 9th birthday featured a shiny new Schwinn bicycle, immortalized in this Polaroid from Thornbury Toys in St. Matthews (Louisville). This poster came along many years later (and is now in the Huffy museum), but in my rural “bike hikes” I fantasized about adding ham radio gear and camping packs. Newly obsessed with electronics, I…

My “most unusual kite” was a lovely airplane design called the Sky Flyer, now just a memory. For decades, it hung in the basement of the old homestead, gradually fading. In 2005, I sold a batch of old kites on eBay, and it included the box… shown here clipped out of the ancient image.

photo by Edward H. Roberts September 25, 1955 “Wait, Daddy, that’s a Kodak Pony 135. If you shoot wide open in this light, you’ll have depth of field issues with the yummy cake lettering unless you tweak the focal plane. Maybe you should stop down a bit… I promise I’ll hold still! In 67 years,…

At this tender age, I don’t have many archive posts… so I’m just using this page to park a few photos from my first year or two. These are from Erie, before we moved to the Louisville area; the high-chair pic above is colorized and dates from sometime in 1953. I was adopted, and one…