This is Kitty, my first cat, posing somewhere near my house. I had never had a pet since I started living on my own, and hadn't planned to get one, but one night when I attended a Sheboygan Symphony after-concert party, the hostess talked me into taking a kitten from her cat's recent litter. Kitty (I wasn't trying to be cute when I named her--she just looked like a Kitty) was a beautiful cat, I always thought, with her colorful patterning.
In the late spring/early summer of 1984 I started playing around with my Nikon in a way that I hadn't since I first bought the camera in 1974 (cf. BOXES 90-92). The pictures in this post were all taken in or near Sheboygan, before I went off on another European trip in mid-summer. They're mostly of Kitty and various human friends, plus some of urban parks and the Kettle Moraine State Forest. Some turned out OK, but all too many are pretty poor. Still, I'm including some of the latter in this post because they show people and places that might interest some of you, or else they display my attempts at unusual photographic effects. If you're mainly interested in my foreign travel, you might best skip to or wait for the next post.
In the first of my Sheboygan '84 slide boxes I found a couple of photos from the fall of '83 taken by someone else's camera, probably Sallie Melgaard's, and given to me. I'm posting them for their 'historical interest' despite the grime on the slides. The first shows a group of us about to go on a weekend bike excursion to the Sparta-Elroy Trail in southwestern Wisconsin; Sallie and her husband Craig organized the trip. The second shows me standing at the edge of the Horicon Marsh, where we must have stopped either going or coming from Sparta-Elroy.
As for my own slides, there are several more of Kitty. The last three of the next six show her in the foliage in my back yard; you have to look carefully at one photo to spot her in the foliage. I can date the last of these photos as early June because of the wild geranium in bloom.
Here's one more shot of Kitty, seen through a screen--you may have to hold the image away from you to make her out. But following that is a more conventional photo that includes my friend Dave Stewart:
That spring Dave and I took photos of one another outside my house, and of the house itself; there must have been a third person who took one of both of us.
I'll even include this bad photo of myself with the church across the street in the background. Besides the Huron Ave. photos I see I took one of Woodlake in Kohler and one of a crabapple tree in bloom on my campus:
One day I went out to the Kettles with another friend, Kelly Dunagan, who was a colleague in the Math Department with a background in film studies. (We co-directed a 40-minute documentary about our campus' 50th-anniversary celebrations.) First stop was at the Point Drive-In, serving old-fashioned frozen custard (since closed, I'm sorry to say):
Here are the photos I took out at the Kettles, showing a small lake; some foliage that could be anywhere; some wildflowers; and Kelly on the top platform of Parnell Tower. (I'll leave out a photo of a deer that is just too blurry.)
On another occasion, my slide box shows, I took some other nature photographs--probably at the Kettles again. So here are some water lilies; a turtle; an unusual fungus with an insect; and a hill with a runner at the top:
Next are a couple of photos I took at my house. The first shows Dave at the front windows, with my globe lamp on the far right (when it was new and intact) and my slide projector in the middle. The second is of Sallie (on the right) and her sister, who was visiting from England if I recall correctly. The one of Dave shows one of the big maple trees that used to be in front of my house.
I experimented with night photography a couple of times, including the next shots, taken at a playground. The third photo was taken while I was spinning on one of those playground wheels:
On another occasion I attempted some photos of Fountain Park, which in those days had colored lights illuminating their recently installed gushing fountain:
This blossoming tree must have been in or near the fountain:
Probably the same evening I took two photos of a place with a huge wall of books and a row of video games beneath. I believe this was in the building on 8th St. that was originally a Montgomery Ward store and later transformed into a high-ceilinged, imaginatively designed, atmospheric pizza parlor called Baxter's, with video games in one corner. Later it became a disco, and now the building houses the Black Pig restaurant and some retail stores. The photos are not good--I never was able to do sharp indoor or night photography without a tripod--but I'll include them for the historical record:
On another occasion I took some photos of Jim and Jean Tobin and Craig Melgaard; I don't know where the photos were taken, or what the occasion was, or why Sallie isn't in the pictures too, or what Craig is pointing at in the second and third pics.
Finally, among this collection of Sheboygan photos, here are four pictures taken at one of the monthly get-togethers of Le Cercle Français--the French Club I still belong to. These are maybe the worst of all the photos I've shared with you in this post--but again I'll include them for the historical record, and with special regrets over the last two, which would have been good if they'd been in better focus. One of our leaders, Françoise, is on the left in the first and third photos, and another leader, Marie, is on the right in the first; the Tobins are standing with me in the fourth; and I no longer remember any of the other people.
In my next few posts I'll be back to travel photos (in better focus), showing a trip I took later that summer to Switzerland, Italy and France.
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