Friday Slide Scan #11 is from the summer of 1964. It shows my Dad fixing my bike, with my brother Rob looking on. The location is the Beka’a valley in Lebanon, so there’s some back-story.
Enlarge this one, that boy is is just impossibly cute.
My Dad was a Professor of Agriculture at the American University of Beirut, which had an Experimental Farm out in the country, about halfway between Zahle and Ba’albek. Some of this territory became very dangerous in the decades between then and now. Ba’albek, crammed up against the Syrian border and being a historic center both for hashish and Hezbollah, may still be.
I remember that bike well; it had no gears but was good and solid, and one day (years after this picture when I was 14 or so) I became a hero in the process of destroying it; a story I’ll have to tell here some time.
Images in the Friday Slide Scans are from 35mm slides taken between 1955 and 2003 by (in rough chronological order) Bill Bray, Jean Bray, Tim Bray, Cath Bray, and Lauren Wood; when I know exactly who took one, I’ll say; in this case, Jean Bray. Most but not all of the slides were on Kodachrome; they were digitized using a Nikon CoolScan 4000 ED scanner and cleaned up by a combination of the Nikon scanning software and PhotoShop Elements.
