Month: November 2009

When people think of the 1960’s the first thing that comes to mind are all the protest marches and hippies on the college campuses. I was in college during these years and did see some of that but that was definitely what I was about. As mentioned in the previous post I spent most of my time working, going to classes, studying, working, and working. My dad was a milkman and didn’t have the money to help me through college so I ended up paying my way through by working almost full time and carrying an 80% course load. Most of that time was in the Fowler House cafeteria on the Purdue University West Lafayette campus. I worked my way up from scrubbing pots and pans to being the head waiter.

Here is a picture of those days.That is me with my arm around my boss on the right side of the lineup. The guy in the middle with blue jeans was Don. He was killed in Vietnam about a year after this picture was taken. He was a heck of a friend and a super guitar player. He left behind a new wife and a baby that was born after he was killed.  I still think of him quite frequently.

The 60s might be best known for the radicals but as you can see much of the rest of us, even on the college campuses,  were pretty much going on with life in our usual hokey ways 🙂 .On Saturdays we often had special themes for the dinner meal. The one in the picture was, of course, about chuck wagons . I didn’t get much sleep in those years but it was a fun period in my life. I made a lot of good friends but I guess as is typical of guys we never kept in contact after graduation. I am hoping to renew some of those friendships in the coming months through searches on the internet.

Ok, I have my new scanner and have dusted off all the albums of pictures in the utility closet so I am just about ready to start the project of digitizing all our old pictures. I decided on using Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 as the digitizing software. It is a little harder to use than my old software but the results are markedly better.  As I mentioned before this is going to be a five month project as there are thousands of pictures involved.

(Postscript July 2010 — As it turns out this project ended about eight months after it was started.  Typical of me, I underestimated how long it would take)

I made a trial run yesterday using some of the pictures I took when I was in college (Go Purdue) in the 60’s. The new scanner works great. I can scan six pictures at a time and the scanner keeps them separate.  I am definitely going to be making a trip down memory lane as just the few I have already done brought back all kinds of memories.

I went to Purdue between 1965 and 1970. That’s me in the picture. I was a lot skinnier and had a lot more hair in those days! 🙂  It took me five years to graduate as I was working about 40 hours per week in order to pay my way through college so I only managed to take about an 80% class load. I worked in the dormitory cafeteria almost every day during the week and the storeroom on Saturdays.  I lived in Fowler Courts for the whole five years. I learned last year that they have torn down the dormitory that replaced Fowler Courts to build a yet newer one! Boy that makes me feel old! I’ll have some more posts about my college years coming soon. I sure would like to link up with some of my old buddies from those years but have been unable to do so yet. More on that later.