FROM THE ELISSON ARCHIVE

The Harris Shutter effect sprays color throughout this image of a cataract at the St. George fishway in New Brunswick, Canada. [Click on the photo to embiggen.]

FROM THE ELISSON ARCHIVE...

...comes this collection of Rude Caricatures.


Myron B., music teacher.

Back in my Snot-Nose Days, I cultivated a minor talent for caricature - “minor” being the operative word. My drawings were not especially skilled in likeness or execution... but they provided a certain amount of amusement, as well as being a good way to survive a boring middle-school class or study hall.


Harold M., fearsome-looking science teacher.

My subjects, more often than not, were teachers. They were available, they were visually interesting - those wrinkles! Those odd hairstyles! - and they made especially good targets by virtue of their convenient position in front of the classroom.


Chemistry teacher. For the life of me, I cannot remember his name. Check out the Don Martin feet!

Was there malice aforethought in these drawings? No, no more than the usual amount of malice a student bears for Those Who Inflict Scholarly Labors. They are attempts at childish ridicule aimed at people who, seen from a more adult perspective, were not deserving of it.

I wonder whether they would consider themselves insulted or honored were they to see these pictures today.

[More below the fold.]

Patrick C., social studies teacher.


Myron B. again, in a more light-hearted moment.


Fred H., social studies teacher.


Ken S., German teacher.


The long-suffering Ken S. again.

FROM THE ELISSON ARCHIVE

This image of a poster-encrusted wall in Mexico City dates from December, 1977.

She Who Must be Obeyed and I, at the invitation of her parents, accompanied them on a trip to Mexico City - a trip that was, ostensibly, to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

Alas, SWMBO did not see much of the city. On the second day of the trip, after having successfully climbed to the top of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán and back down, she twisted her ankle on the flat ground of the parking lot. Unable to walk without suffering the Agonies of the Gosh-Darned, she confined herself to our hotel room for much of the rest of the week.

Billie Bob, the Daddy d’SWMBO, managed to consume carne asada (grilled marinated skirt steak) at almost every restaurant we visited.

As for me, I gave the plumbing of Mexico City’s Zona Rosa its toughest trial to date. Not something I should be proud of, but, perversely, I am.

After that late-1977 voyage, I made many subsequent trips to the ol’ Distrito Federal... but always for business purposes and without the company of my beloved. None of those trips were quite as much fun.

FROM THE ELISSON ARCHIVE

Mrs. Bruni’s first grade class at Unqua School, April 1959. Click to embiggen; click here for the full-size, high-resolution image.

Here you have little Elisson in his first grade class in this photograph taken fifty years ago this month.

Fifty years! Damn, that’s a lot of water under the bridge... a whole half-century. Fully a decade before the first moon landing, the very idea of which would have rendered any one of us completely slack-jawed with astonishment. Sputnik, after all, had been launched by the Russians only at the beginning of the previous school year.

Looking at the picture, I wonder. Where are all those people now? In the accumulated pile of Circumsolar Travels, how many have been raised up, how many brought low? How many have lived, and how many have died? What are they like? Do they have families? Children? Grandchildren?

I am ashamed to say that I can only put names to a handful. There’s my friend Walter - he’s the one with the string tie in the center row. (Now, there’s a Fashion Statement for you!) And the dapper little guy in the front row with the pocket square is Josh P. But I can only name about seven others with any degree of certainty, the fact of which makes me want to mourn the passing of all that time... and all those brain cells.

The image itself - unlike my memories of it - is razor sharp. It was taken with a large-format film camera, most likely a 4 x 5" tripod-mounted Crown Graphic, and the black-and-white prints we received (for the then-princely sum of $5) were finished to a crisp gloss and shoved into a heavy cardboard display jacket. Check out the full-size version: You can read the childish block printing on the wall display, that’s how clear the photograph is.

I’m pretty sure my old buddy Steve V. - who is not in this picture, but who would be a part of my third grade class two years later - can still name almost everyone here. Got a mind like a steel trap, that one has.

Hey! Test your vision and mental acuity - see if you can spot Elisson. He’s the one who looks exactly like Elder Daughter did at the same age. Give us your best guesses in the Comments! Answer is below the fold.

Update: Thanks to some Internet sleuthing by SWMBO, we now know that our teacher, Mrs. Doris Bruni, lived to a ripe old age, passing away in late 2005 at the age of 85. Ave atque vale...

I’m the guy standing in the back row, second from the left. Erica, PeggyU, and Jimbo figured it out... not an easy task, given that the photo dates from my pre-Colanderic Headgear days.

FROM THE ELISSON ARCHIVE

“Excelsior, you fatheads!”
The late, great Jean Shepherd at the Overseas Press Club, New York, March 2, 1970.

By sheer coincidence, I stumbled upon the three photographs you see here while digging through some Miscellaneous Crap in the basement. I shot them almost 39 years ago to the day, at a press conference in New York City. The event is chronicled here.

This was real old-school photography. The photos were taken using 35mm Tri-X Pan film, and developed by hand using the classical wet chemistry. The only thing I don’t remember is whether I enlarged them (they’re 5x7") at home or in the school darkroom.

Update: I just found an amazing piece of arcana, for which I can thank the Internet - an album of Jean Shepherd reading the poems of Robert W. Service. Really!

Despite his occasional issues with pronunciation - for some reason, he has trouble with the word “sluice” - Shep brings these great poems to life with his own inimitable style. I know of at least one person that will get a huge charge out of this stuff...

FROM THE ELISSON ARCHIVE

The Mistress of Sarcasm and She Who Must Be Obeyed have spent the last three days in a frenzy of Basement-Organizing Activity.

This is no lightweight job. We’ve lived here in the latest incarnation of Chez Elisson for hard on to ten years...and the basement is the Final Frontier, the last repository of Random Accumulated Crap. Getting it in some semblance of order is no job for the faint of heart.

In three days, there has been an astonishing amount of progress as the Mistress and SWMBO have relentlessly attacked the Mountains of Miscellany. You can now walk around down there without tripping over twenty thousand separate obstacles.

Once we Garage-Sale some of the more useful detritus and have Mr. Trash-Man haul off the remainder, we’ll have a reasonable amount of space down there.

We’ve found all kinds of interesting things that haven’t seen the light of day in years. Old laboratory glassware. Darkroom equipment. Hundreds of Sunday newspaper comics sections. Magazines from the 1980’s. Anybody remember Cuisine?

And we’ve found Old Photographs.




Here’s one of Anna, the Grandmomma d’Elisson, flanked by her two children. On the left is nine-year-old Uncle Phil; on the right is the Momma d’Elisson, who is all of three years old in this photograph taken sometime in mid-1931.

Anna was unusual for the time. A strawberry blonde, she drove a car...and she was an athlete, playing both golf and tennis. Back then, none of these were typical Motherly Activities...at least, not amongst Our Crowd.

She could lob a mean oath, too. A useful talent in Sheepshead Bay, back in the day. Or now.

I sure miss her. She was, as they might say, a pistol.

FROM THE ELISSON ARCHIVE

SWMBO’s Printer’s Case o’ Tchotchkes.

The Missus likes to collect Useless Little Things. Tchotchkes. And this Printer’s Case is a perfect way to show them off. It hangs on the wall of our family room.

Figuring significantly in this collection is the Missus’s pile of Wade Whimsies, miniature porcelain figurines in the form of characters from nursery rhymes. But there’s other cool crap too - like those little bottles of Dr Pepper and Tabasco sauce.

Now, if I can only figure out what to do with my collection of Shrunken Heads...

FROM THE ELISSON ARCHIVE

Cambridge, England, May 2000.

This pastoral scene is from Cambridge, England, where I had traveled on behalf of the Great Corporate Salt Mine in order to meet with one of our major global customers. What you see is, literally, a Cam Bridge: a bridge over the River Cam.

It was an interesting enough trip: I had not been to Jolly Olde for over a decade, and this was my first journey by rail outside the immediate environs of London. In retrospect, it was a little like riding the Hogwarts Express, except without the bogie-flavoured jellybeans. And, happily, we managed to schedule enough free time to permit a leisurely walk around the grounds of Cambridge University.

I felt right at home at Cambridge...and well I could have, for the architecture at my own Alma Mater borrowed heavily from the classic Tudor Gothic style. And a classic Limerick came to mind:

There was a young man of St John’s
Who wanted to bugger the swans,
But the loyal hall-porter
Said, “Pray take my daughter!
Them birds are reserved for the dons.”

Indeed. Thankfully, I saw no swans...and dons were thin on the ground, this being Reading Period, when students were busily preparing for final exams.

There’s a Cambridge on this side of the pond as well, and Elder Daughter spent many years there following her graduation from Boston University. We’ve spent many a pleasant weekend there, using it as a jumping-off place to explore the Greater Boston area, or to sample the delights of Harvard Square...but there is something to be said for the Original, what?