Seattle Through My Father’s Eyes
Inside are miniature commercial souvenir photographs showing some of the places my father was seeing: Mount Rainier, Seattle’s waterfront, Pioneer Square and the Aurora Bridge with Mount Rainier visible beyond the city.
They weren’t photographs my father took himself. They were commercially produced souvenirs that a traveler or serviceman could purchase and send home.
But that doesn’t make them impersonal.
My father chose them.
Today we can take a photograph and send it across the country in seconds. During World War II, sharing an experience with someone far away was very different. A small photograph like this could show Mary a place she had never seen and allow my father to share a little of the world through which he was traveling.
But then he did something that transformed these inexpensive souvenir photographs into family treasures.
He turned them over and wrote to her.
To be continued on another email…
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Letter to Induction Center – August 1942
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