I’ve always been something of a control-panel geek, and once I had committed to building the Winnebiko II and heading out again, the project became focused on console design. If I had learned anything from that first 10,000 miles, it was that the key to this whole adventure would be full access to all on-board…

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I was struck by the obvious affinity of these two photos from my 1984-5 travels, and they have always been together in the album. The top one is Gaviota State Beach, about 35 miles west of Santa Barbara, California. The stone columns are in Arches National Park, an astounding place in eastern Utah and the…

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Steve Roberts in 1981 clowning around with computer

From a binder of ancient negatives and matching contact sheets: The photo above is a goofy selfie from May, 1981, in my house in Columbus (old-fashioned EXIF date stamp in the form of a wall calendar from Radio Beijing). I was active on The Source as “wordy,” used DIALOG heavily for consulting, and was working…

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These three contact sheets were tucked into an old binder, and under the microscope I could see that the calendar on the wall was April, with the first on a Wednesday. That happened in 1981, which makes sense – my first book (Micromatics) was released in late 1980, and I can see the fat but…

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Here’s a random bit of history from the archives, unrelated to everything else on this site… picture me as a 19-year-old hippie geek in 1971, working for Sylvania as a technician installing Autovon central office telephone equipment at Fort Benning during the Vietnam war. Morbidly fascinated by the My Lai massacre trial, where William Calley…

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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…

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My father, Edward Roberts, was aboard the maiden voyage of the liner America, which left New York on August 10, 1940. Here is his amazing 37-minute home movie of the adventure, including details of ship and passengers as well as shore excursions in St. Thomas, San Juan, Port-au-Prince, and Havana. Here he is with fellow…

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Pomander Walk February 27, 1931 The gorgeous photo below is from Swarthmore High School… and I was fortunate enough to find the program as well in my father’s old papers (he was one of the stage managers). The photographer was Lewis Studios, and the 7×16-inch photo is remarkably well-preserved. I have scanned it and placed…

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Circa 1890… some Roberts family history I have never understood my own genealogy very well, yet I am the last of a line on my father’s side, in possession of precious photos and papers relating the history of this distinguished Quaker family from West Chester, Pennsylvania. I’ll gradually post a few things here, just to…

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