Trip to Ohio, 1934
Dan Bogey

The big plastic tub had been sitting in the cellar for a couple of years, placed there after my parent’s estate was settled. It was filled with old photographs that no one else in the family wanted. I didn’t want them either, but I was reluctant to send the photos to the landfill without paying them at least some small token of respect.  

The cold December rain meant we would be even more tethered to home. We were getting used to this world without restaurants, theaters and concerts, and just about anything outside of our immediate four walls. With no end in sight, the strain was getting closer and closer to the surface. So when my wife said, “Now would be a good time to go through those pictures,” I reluctantly retrieved the bin and began spreading the photos on the living room floor in piles separated  into known and unknown subjects: “damaged,” “discarded,” and “mystery.”

The mystery pile quickly proved to be the biggest and most intriguing. My parents were both the youngest in their immediate families and my sister was almost a generation older than I, so the faces in the photos were strangers, old strangers. Uncles, aunts, grandparents, and friends, preserved in black and white fragments of time. The folks in these photos all looked older than they probably were with the hats and ties of the men and the women dressed almost formally for every occasion. While the majority of the people were unfamiliar to me I would occasionally detect a much younger version of Uncle Jack  playing cards or Aunt Holly before she went gray. Every once in a while I’d recognize the setting for some happy event, but found very little to reveal what part these people once played in my family’s lives.

As I flipped through the faces, locations, and scenes, my judgement was harsh. If I didn’t recognize something in the image and it didn’t have any identifying information on the back, it went unsympathetically into the discard pile. After a couple hundred, I noticed that some photos had Trip to Ohio, 1934 printed in neat handwriting on the back. Despite the fact that I knew of no relatives from Ohio and none of the people in the photos looked familiar, I decided to give them their own sub-category, “Ohio.”  

I grew bored and achy bending over the images and my judgement became less sentimental as the requirements for inclusion became more uncompromising. I began ruling on style and appearance, accepting no headless uncles or half cousins. The keeper stack gradually became more manageable. After two and a half hours, most of the photos were either in the damaged or mystery piles, with a much smaller pile for the known. Even smaller were the Ohio pictures, there were a little over 30 marked photos.

I found a smaller container for the keepers, but I was still unsure about the Ohio pictures. I set them aside for future consideration, even though that was against the clutter reduction objective of the chore. After a bite to eat, I was drawn back to Ohio photos with the intention of adding it to discards and wrapping up my little excursion into the past. But my curiosity as to who the people in the photos were and what relation they had with my family won out and they were spared for further examination.

I spread the Ohio photos on the dining room table and attempted to place them in some kind of order. Chronologically seemed the most logical. The vehicle and the people in it looked so neat and eager at what I assumed was the beginning of the trip, then gradually assumed a dingy and worn look as the trip wore on. The car was a Buick Special and it approximated the color and size of a whale. It had been washed and waxed to give it a sleek impression as it glided through Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.  As the trip wore on, layers of dust dulled the shine and the boxes and suitcases strapped on to running boards became battered and grimy. The highway system was primitive and the trip must have carried them over a plenty of unmaintained dirt roads, making the drive a lot longer and more uncomfortable.

A series of photos taken from the back seat established the man behind the wheel as the main driver, and he was the focus of most of the pictures. A couple of the shots featured the driver with a woman snuggled closely up against him. Inadvertently, part of a different arm or the back of a head appeared in the shot, leading me to conclude that there was another person sharing the back seat with the photographer. Finally, completely out of place, was a shot of a couple, younger than the driver and woman, standing in a stream or pond holding their clothes above the water line and laughing. I concluded that these two must be the backseat occupants.  

Rearranging the photos to coincide with the ongoing trip was almost impossible. The condition of the car and the load strapped to it was the best indicator. Then there was the flat tire photo where the driver ditched his suit jacket, hat and tie to change the tire. A series of three photos showed him jacking up the car, wiping the sweat from his brow and then moving menacingly toward the photographer threatening consequences if the intrusive picture taking continued. I placed this toward the end of my lay-out, figuring that patience was wearing thin as the four people stuck together days on end were becoming weary of one another.

The picture of the young people remained an enigma—the car was not in sight and there were no other full photos to judge changes in clothing or mood. I put them in the beginning of the series, seeing their good spirits as optimism at the start of the journey. Then I placed them at the end, their joy as a consequence of finally reaching their destination. They were out of place with the rest of the pictures and would have been destined for the unknown pile, except for the writing on the back, Trip to Ohio, 1934.  Was their laughter a hint of the good times to come or would the coming years wipe the smiles from their faces?

I gathered up the keeper pictures into a much smaller container, together with an envelope marked “Ohio.” The rain turned to sleet and pinged against the window as I wondered if there was room for one more in the backseat of that Buick Special, kicking up dust on an old dirt road somewhere in Ohio, way back in 1934.