The lasting legacy left by my father is a significant number—hundreds at least—of photographic slides that remain from those he said had been damaged by water. I don’t know the specifics of the incident that destroyed perhaps half of them. That’s what he inherited to me, and I got more than did most family members.
The co-pastor couple of his church got the family farm to hold in trust intact. They did, for a whole 13 months, until May 2025, when a sale closed and they profited from it. Fortunately, the young farmer buying the property is son of the man who had leased the land for decades; I am sincerely glad for that.
The co-pastors cashed in on the last, lasting legacy of the Wilcox tribe. I work through the memories the disorganized collection of slides evoke. I waited until yesterday to start the process (my father died in April 2024). Yeah, there are a few emotions to sort out.
Last summer, I bought the Kodak Slide N Scan Max Digital Film Slide Scanner 7″ for the purpose of digitizing the slides. I would have started yesterday, but the device only supports SDHC cards with maximum 32GB capacity. Seriously? All of mine are newer, unsupported SD cards of greater capacity. I had to order an older card from Amazon; delivered today.
The Featured Image is the first, and so far only, slide to be digitized. No vitals are available, but I assume the camera used was a Kowa—likely the seT R2. My father used to rave about the leaf shutter, which oddly was built into the interchangeable lenses. That made operation nearly silent for shooting wildlife but also rendered the glass unusable on other cameras (which typically put the shutter in the body).
If Google Image Search can be trusted, and I am iffy about the classification, the little chick is an Upland Sandpiper fledgling. The photo isn’t sharp, which could be a focus error combined with shallow depth of field or a problem introduced during the scanning process. Perhaps doing a few more slides will determine which is culprit.
Original, processing date on the slide is July 1974, and likely location would have been Northern Maine, in the Allagash wilderness, somewhere between Dickey and Rivière-Bleue.
I will share more photos from the slides that are appropriate. Expect that 1974 nostalgia may be a running theme going forward. We shall see.
Photo Credit: Joseph Wilcox