I’m going to have to dig deep to fill the 1970-71 era in these archives… few photos from that year have turned up, although there are a couple of excruciatingly embarrassing road journals that I should compress into a post in the interest of continuity. After abruptly leaving school and hitchhiking to Colorado in an audacious (and poorly planned) escape, I circled back across the US and, nudged by my girlfriend’s riverboat captain father, lied about my age to join the National Maritime Union and work for a summer as a deckhand on barges in Illinois and Wisconsin. This brief snippet of film is 17-year-old me getting dropped off at the Interstate in 1970, to my mother’s obvious dismay and my own evident delight. On the road! I was enroute to rendezvous with a tugboat for my next 30-day gig (7 days a week, 6-on 6-off around the clock, fairly brutal but amazing pay for the time… and occasional periods of languorous river cruising).

This digitized snippet of film is by my father, Edward H. Roberts, shown above around this time in his office at General Electric.

23 seconds from 1970…

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