Are you intimidated by birthdays that can be divided by 10? They’ve never been that big a deal to me. I rather enjoyed turning 30, 40 and 50…but turning 35 and 45 caught my attention a bit more. Today I turn 55. You can see I have chosen to embrace my mother’s traditional approach to […]
My sister in-law Debbie lost a fight with cancer a couple of days ago. She is the Girl Scout in the second row; I am a couple of rows behind her and slightly to the left. This was the only group photo from my grade school years that was in color. Maybe that’s why it […]
Raising kids is a delight. As regular readers know, I take seriously my responsibilities as a parent. That’s why, back in the summer of 2010, I exercised extreme caution when I dangled Lana and her camera over the tiger cage barrier at the zoo so she could look death in the eye and get a […]
It’s odd to live in a world in which a 45 year-old photograph shows up suddenly, yet thanks to the modern miracle (or curse) of technology this picture arrives unexpectedly, and I get snatched up for a quick trip back in time. Time travel seems to be an increasingly common preoccupation on these pages. You […]
Gerry Pearce loved the water. He told stories of swim meets at Baghdad College in the mid-1940’s, and although he never tried to teach me to speak Arabic he did teach me to swim. Those early lessons were during the summer of 1962. My dad and I spent untold hours together in various pools over […]
My dad Gerry Pearce was 33 years old when I took this picture of him back in the summer of 1962. I was three. This was the first photograph I ever took. I still remember holding the big, heavy black camera in my small hands and trying to keep it steady while at the same […]
Here’s a nice shot of my paternal grandmother and a kitten. It was taken in Scotland in about 1898. For no extra charge, here’s a similar shot of me, taken in Hollywood in 1965. Share on Facebook
Alexis and I went to see the new Star Trek movie. We loved it. I went into the theater looking for a movie that would deliver the idealistic creative spirit of The Original Series – extra-terrestrial green-skinned belly dancers! When a nearly-naked green-skinned woman from Orion made her appearance early in the movie, I knew […]
This is an old-fashioned street tomcat who understood the meaning of freedom. He would come and go at will, disappear for months on end, reliably doing exactly as he pleased. He was old in the 1950’s. By 1969, when this photograph was taken, he had cheated death so many times that death decided to go […]
This is a nice action shot from 41 years ago. You’ll notice that I am being photographed from above, with a cliff behind me and rocks about a hundred feet below. Nobody said it wasn’t OK to climb up the sheer face of an ice-covered mountain until after I had done it! If it was […]
This is the fourth anniversary of my mother’s death. Here is how she looked in the summer of 1961. To see how she looked twenty years later, go here. Share on Facebook
Today my beloved spouse celebrates a birthday. To commemorate this event on-line, I offer a Spirograph flower I drew in 1968. Did you know that Spirograph patterns are hypotrochoids and epitrochoids? Share on Facebook
Gardner Street School is a block north of Sunset Boulevard and a few blocks west of La Brea. I showed up here for first through fifth grade and I hadn’t been back inside the place since the last day of school in June of 1969. I used to walk half a block to buy the […]
Forty years ago today, I did my first bit of political work. For a few minutes during the afternoon of Saturday, June 1, 1968, I handed out bumper stickers for the Bobby Kennedy campaign. I was nine years old, and I figured I was a late-bloomer, seeing as how much younger kids had been active, […]
I met my maternal grandmother once. Here is Wilhemena Reaume with her daughter Joan and her grandson Scott. My grandfather, Robert J. DeLap, deserted the family in 1930, shortly after my mom was born. Wilhemena abandoned her daughter to be raised by her dad’s parents. Mother and daughter were reunited for a few hours one […]