Today is warm and as a variation from usual blog entries I decided to celebrate nine years of computer literacy by sharing this earliest Paint effort - it expresses all the feelings of those earliest lessons in computer literacy for me - Man with Two Pumpkins Walking Downstairs.

Coast to Coast Autos Arrive at Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition (see video 5 blogs down)

Charles, Birger and Eric Gord at AYP 1909

Yes! A reference to the celebration about the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition is my chance to show this post card which shows my grandfather and two of his brothers with two other men in a car with a banner with AYP on it. Model T's on a re-creation of the 1909 coast-to-coast automobile race to the Exposition were scheduled to arrive Sunday at Memorial Way, the formal entrance to the University of Washington Campus. (There is a video several blogs below.)

The most obvious association I make with photos and other items from my parents' archives is the memory of my mother's home. My mother brought my sister and me there twice a week all through our childhoods. Sometimes they brought out photos to to look through at the kitchen table, or other memorabilia. This hundred-year-old post card on it reminds me first and most importantly to me, of my mother's home, where it was first stored.

For my father, his photos' location was a different matter. All the photos left by my father must have been stored with his brother, Uncle Fred, while my father was in England with the U.S. Army in World War Two.

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Photos by Theodore Jensen, 1941, Palmer, Alaska

These photos my father took in Alaska at the Matanuska Valley Fair in 1941. In a recent post I linked to photos of the Alaska State Fair from the early 1970's: if you scroll down at these photos, one of the mountains shows, the same mountain in my father's photograph. He took a row of photos which add up to a panorama.

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journalism note

A Journalism note: At the News Tribune in Tacoma today is a front-page article about photographs on auction at a big auction business on Antique Row.

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A Literary Note

A literary note: if you scroll part way down at the photo site I linked to for photos by Stephen Cysewski of the Alaska State Fair in the early 1970's, there is a sight referred to in a book of stories by Carol Bly called Backbone. It is a Mouse Roulette Wheel. (Carol Bly's book includes stories as well about Lutherans in the midwest. It is possible that the Mouse Roulette Wheel itself was brought from the midwest to Alaska for the fair idea that was imported by the Depression Colonials from the Midwest.)

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Check out "The Finish Line" on Ocean to Ocean in a T

 

Check out "The Finish Line" on Ocean to Ocean in a T

To view this video, visit:
http://oceantoocean.ning.com/video/video/show?id=2843968%3AVideo%3A7554

Tour de Revs

The Tour de Revs bikes raise consciousness about alternative transportation as they ride through farmland raising money for Lutheran World Hunger. In Pierce County they are sponsored by the Southwestern Washington Synod of the ELCA, Evangelical Lutheran Church in American, and they inadvertently coincide with the Tour de France.

According to the blog, the Tour de Revs were most recently at the Matanuska Valley in Alaska. It is the site of the Alaska State Fair, a midwest state fair imported to Alaska with Depression Dust Bowl refugees. For photos of the fair from the 70's, by cysewski, clik.

The tour the revs travel in a van and do pledged bike rides to raise the money. This is what went on in Sumner at one o'clock as they set out on the 50 mile ride:

I ask and yes, these six bikes are the biking group that will accompany the Tour de Revs from Sumner Pierce County Library parking lot.

They're stopped at the railroad tracks! And a couple of kids bike off, maybe to the railroad track.

When the yellow bike rider stands up off the log she was on, the bike falls over.

Then there is a train whistle, AMTRAK, Sounder Commuter Train, freight train. It is a freight train that goes by on the other side of the big hardware store.

Then the three-person bike made of bamboo arrives.

Their cleats sound on the cement.

(A mustang that just parked backs up right up to them to un-park, as though they are not there because at other times they are not there.)

All right, all right, someone says. Traffic and Maple. Or we could go right. To the trail head. OK. OK.

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