Barbara J. Hamby

Down Memory Lane

Yesterday I took my digital camera on a trip down Memory Lane to the neighborhood where I lived when I first moved to Portland with my daughter in 1962. I had promised my sisters I’d take a picture of the house where our youngest sister was married fifty years ago and where our parents lived at that time. When I drove up to the house on Southeast 47th Avenue, a man came out of the yard next door with a camera in his hand, walked into the street, and took a picture of the house. I was really curious, but afraid to ask him anything, for fear I’d be prevented from taking a picture. I suspect he might have been taking it for the city, since the old house looks pretty run down and has three or four cars parked in the carport and yard.
I drove to the end of the block, parked and walked back. By then, the man with the camera had disappeared. I stood in the street to take a picture and noted that the light was wrong and all I had in the viewfinder and the screen was a black shadow. I snapped the picture and figured if it didn’t turn out, I’d say that probably most of us wouldn’t want to see it now, anyway. The good and bad news is that the picture looks better than the actual property does. The lumber I saw stacked in the yard the last time I drove by must have been used to build the new deck in front.
I also took a snap of the house on 50th that one of my sisters formerly owned and I rented when I first moved to Portland. It has fared much better and is pretty cute. The garage, which had to be rebuilt after a tree fell on it in the October 1962 windstorm, is still there.
After considering transferring the pictures onto my computer myself, I wimped out and took my camera to Walgreen’s. They are transferring those two pictures, along with more than one hundred others, onto a CD for me. At a price of $2.99, I can’t lose.

We can put the old houses up on a computer screen when we get together in Seattle next weekend and have some fun reminiscing.