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 stops at various roadside attractions. It has been over sixty years, so the details are murky.

I scanned these slides on the capable little Plustek 8200i using VueScan instead of the native SilverFast, and was amazed at the extraction of useful color. All photos are clickable for full-screen versions.

The classic roadside pullout for sandwiches, peering around with binoculars, and stretching the legs. That’s our old blue Ford with the door open.
I love this one. Young’s Bicycle Shop in Nantucket still exists, and I was delighted to share this with them via Facebook in 2020. I like to imagine that some deep cycling seed was planted on this day… leading to this almost a quarter-century later.
On the beach with mom at Stone Harbor.
The shipwreck of the SS Atlantus, in Cape May, New Jersey. Love mom’s cateye glasses…
I don’t remember this at all, but my father had been an avid Star sailor in the forties and maintained friendships with fellow boat folk.
This is a little embarrassing, but in the interest of proper archiving… here is a film clip. I’m the dorky kid in the red sweater demanding attention, and the other kids (Cliff, John, Fred, and Jane) are my cousins. The lady in the white blouse is my mother’s sister Nancy, and that’s my mom, Phyllis, at left. My father’s 8mm home movie was scanned, stabilized, and color corrected by Harbor Digitizing.
Here I am with my cousin Fred.
This was a couple of months before that vacation, on our driveway in Jeffersontown with Taffy and a balsa model airplane. Just to show the crazy challenge of getting color out of these things, a raw scan of the original E2 Ektachrome slide is below.
Ektachrome E2 from 1959
Date of this is uncertain, but close. My parents and I are in the side yard of our house in Jeffersontown, Kentucky.

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