Mariposa Grove
Source: Art Falk archives
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It bothered me that my 83-year-old Dad was paying rent on a storage unit he hadn’t visited in twenty years. It seemed like a waste of money. When I asked what was inside, he shrugged and said it was junk – useless stuff he’d accumulated but never gotten around to throwing out. After some prodding, he agreed to let me help him clear the space out and extinguish the monthly payment.
He was right: most of it was worthless. Stale linens. Two full sets of Encyclopedia Brittanicas. My sister’s high-school tennis trophies. A dangerous old space heater. There wasn’t much of anything worth keeping, so we spent half a day filling a nearby dumpster.
We did, however, find several boxes stuffed with trip diaries, large-format negatives, home movie reels, and dozens of Kodak slide cartons, all fastidiously labeled in my grandfather’s crabbed handwriting. Since Dad didn’t own equipment to view the films, he seemed ready to jettison everything to the garbage can. But after inspecting a few of Art Falk’s labels, which tantalizingly included Acapulco 1956 and Berlin 1960, I dug further to see what might be worth preserving.
Sitting in an old chair, I randomly opened a few of the Spanish-yellow Kodak slide boxes. When I held the cardboard frames to the sky, I saw Checkpoint Charlie. I saw the US Capitol surrounded by blue and black Plymouths and DeSotos. And I saw, in dazzling, saturated Kodachrome, a picture of my then-thirteen-year-old Dad and his little sister standing out in the middle of a vast field of daisies under a pale blue Midwestern sky.
This wasn’t trash. This was the motherlode.