As I sorted through the photos I found many that I had never seen before. There was one set in particular–taken at my grandparent’s 40th and my parent’s 10th anniversary party in June 1957 that really set me on my explorations.

The photo above shows my father’s parents surrounded by their nine grandchildren. I’m in the front row, second from the right. If you look closely you can see a boy up in the tree.

It was when I was creating an album for my middle sister’s birthday that I noticed that she DID look angelic in the photos. L was always considered sweet, but that’s only one side of her. As we look at more photos you’ll see the other sides.

The Newest Cousin

I also noticed who was in the photos and who wasn’t. There were the most pictures of my cousin N. She was eight months old, but other than the group shot above, a couple of my other cousins weren’t photographed.

My Grandparents

Prior to my sister’s request I was talking to my webmasters about changing the format of my blog and website. In fact over the past few days I had been working with them on improvements, enhancements, and changes.

I originally planned the website to be in three or four sections–Capturing the Soul was about looking at photographs beyond the conceptions and stories to sense how they touch you. Exploring family photos was about storing and archiving photos and writing a family history.  The final section, William Henry Jackson’s San Diego is about my master’s thesis on William Henry Jackson’s Photographs of San Diego.

As I began to write my blog my cousins began responding and asking for more.  To their children the family history is something they know little of.  Although the photos were taken at family events they were rarely shared so the images were new to everyone.

To please my cousins — I love positive feedback — I wrote a lot about the family. In doing so I was straying from my original intent which was to be a more general site about looking at family photos.  I have a number of stories that I want to share.  After hearing from D’s wife G I wanted to share stories about him.  I didn’t because as I thought about writing on one story I realized that if it and the related story about his father were publicly seen they would be funny, but embarrassing.

So I’ve been editing my stories in my desire not to offend.  Sometimes I haven’t written because I couldn’t send the story out to the world at large.  Web searches change everything.  I want Search Engine Optimization for my website, but I don’t want it about my personal life.  I’ve worried about people getting hold of names and dates.  Identity theft is a big problem.

I realized that my changing the format of my website and blog is the right thing to do.  I will continue to have a general blog about looking at photos or about life in general.  I’m also going to add a private site for the family only. I want this site to be interactive. I want feedback from the family and changes and modifications as they come up. To my family I’ll let you know the information once I get it running after Re’s bar mitzvah.

Henry G. Peabody Collection

To the rest of the world, I’m working on getting William Henry Jackson’s San Diego up on the site. This site may also contain work by other photographers of the period.  In a Google search totday I found another reference to my thesis.  This time it was on the Henry G. Peabody Collection at the Huntington Library page of the Online Archive of California website. Peabody was Jackson’s partner in the Detroit Publishing Company and had photographed a number of the CA images in the Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The painting above was inspired by two photographs of my grandparents and by a painting by my Grandma Lizzie. It was painted by M Goodwin about 1969.  M never titled it, but I titled it The Goodwin Family Tree. During the 1950s Lizzie took painting classes at the Jewish Community Center that were taught by the painter John Baldessari. Her style was primitive and M modeled this style in this painting.

The photos that inspired the painting are shown here.  The photo at the right of Grandpa with his arm around Lizzie, holding a bottle of beer in the other hand. The other was the photo of Grandpa smelling the blossoms on the peach tree that was in their backyard.

The painting  that inspired M is to the left. It is of the peach tree in blossom with the sun coming through.  The palm trees Grandpa planted to raise and sell surround the tree. He did not understand the slow growth of palms and the variety he planted never had the popularity of other palms.  When Rozzie had the house moved she didn’t make anything on the palm trees.

Lizzie’s Paintings

When I was in the Cooperstown Graduate Program I did a project on Lizzie’s paintings for my Folk Art class. The instructors, Louis and Aggie Jones wanted the paintings for the Fenimore House Museum collection, I gave them the slides instead.

I have two of her paintings.  One is of trees and hills reflected in a pond, although they don’t match. 

The other is of me. It has the notation To Dora Frumkin, May 10, 1963. I was eight years old.

Unlike genealogy family history isn’t always direct, linear, clean, or pretty. In genealogy you have a chart with names, dates, births, deaths, and marriages – the facts. As I mentioned in my last blog once we add the factor of pictures and place of births we can make assumptions of connections, but just because Vava Brodsky or the poet Joseph Brodsky have the same last name, it doesn’t make them related. Just as births in very distant places doesn’t mean that they’re not. As with all history writing, family history is about interpretation of events. It involves sensing and perceiving what happened and, in the case of identifying the contents photos, intuition.

I recently read a manuscript of an  unpublished book Wonderlust my friend Laurie MacDougall just wrote. It is a fast moving account of her life as the daughter of a Hollywood screenwriter living on a farm in the San Fernando Valley in the 1940′s and ‘50′s. What makes her book work so well is that she found her mother’s journals and poetry and had the transcripts of an interview of her father written for the Screenwriters Guild. It is a caring account of the humanness of family. There is no blame, just compassion and humor.

It is with this type of compassion that I am writing. We all have faults, problems and inconsistencies. Perfection isn’t interesting, but the stories that make us laugh or cry are. This blog is not a memoir or autobiography. It is what comes up for me or others when looking at these pictures. Laurie told me “My family wrote. Yours took pictures”.

Who’s in the photo

After my last post my cousin V wrote me asking “Ok the picture with the Brody Sisters 1946,,,,who is everyone???”

I meant to identify it, but it got late and I just wanted to post the piece. I asked my second cousin Mark to verify that it was his grandfather, Meyer in the photo. He said that he was unsure.   I assume that it is (intuition) because of where he is standing in relation to both Alice and Reine.  I also looked at other photos with Alice in them and he’s there.

Seated:  Shirley, Rozzie (Lizzie’s daughter), Alice, Dora, and Lila (Dora’s daughter).  Standing: Meyer Gaffen (Alice’s husband), Reine (Alice’s daughter), Lizzie, Robbie (Lizzie’s son), and his first wife (whose name I don’t know).

V also asked “Is that the ranch house on Laurel Street…what is the structure to the right???” It is Grandpa and Lizzie’s house, but in the ‘40′s the property was still a chicken ranch and not yet divided.  That happened in the early ‘50′s.  I’m unsure of what the structure is in the background to the right.  It looks like scaffolding to me.

V grew up in that house.  She was born after the property surrounding the house was sold and turned into a housing subdivision.  The property was on Laurel St. between 53rd and 54th in east San Diego.  I grew up about four blocks away.Up the hill at 55th and Laurel.

Comments from V

V also wrote:I read your new insights…you have an amazing, and accurate memory! I enjoy what you write, and I think you are very insightful. Thank you for doing this.I don’t think we are of the same family (rg: as Vava Brodsky)…but, she does look a lot like grandma. I think L looks the most like grandma Lizzie.

I too looked in the mirror and for a moment…I thought I looked just like my Mom.  My Mom and I had the exact same feet, but our features on our face were very different…but, for that moment…I looked just like her…I remember how it struck me…as it did with you as well, when it happened to you.  I think my teeth were a lot like my Mom’s as well, and our teeth were more from the Goodwin side of the family.

RG’s note:  We all have small jaws.   As for the teeth, I think that she’s referring to the size and shape.  She had to wear braces–I didn’t.  She is blonde and freckled and I’m dark and olive complected.

Grandma’s family lived on a Grofts land.  Her father was a blacksmith. I think he was manager of the property and lived well, compared to many Jews.  That is why they had so much money when they came. I think they also needed the money, since they had no one in the US, and needed the money to be able to stay, by showing they didn’t need someone to sponsor them, and help support them.

RG:  The story I remember is that the Groft’s sons and Lizzie’s older brothers immigrated to the US together after the Groft warned Lizzie’s father Max that things were going to get bad.  This is much like Tevya being warned in Fiddler on the Roof. They settled in Providence, RI. The Ellis Island manifests document that Lizzie’s parents were going to join their sons in Providence.

Grandpa’s side of the family was very orthodox.  Grandma was called the shicksta when she married Grandpa.  I believe Grandpa revolted from what he considered the extreme rules of being orthodox and left home at a fairly early age.  Grandma fit his world well…being Jewish was very important…but the orthodox ways were not what Grandpa wanted any part of.

Family resemblence

I heard from Birgit Wolz today.  She took the time to look at what I wrote about her last week.  She wrote “you look just like your grandmother”.  I took no offense to that since she was referring to my Grandma Lizzie, not my Grandma Fannie.  I think that I look like both my parents.In fact, I had an experience about fifteen years ago where as I was washing my face, I looked into the mirror and saw what Lizzie probably looked like in her 30′s.  I told my father about it and he gave one of his famously negative retorts of, “yeah, no great beauty”.

What Birgit doesn’t know is that most of us Brody’s look alike.  We have the high cheekbones and the short heavy legs (with the exception of Valerie) that my mother referred to as “Brody legs”.   The ten Goodwin cousins we do look a lot alike.  Although not V, as I think that her father’s family’s genes must have been stronger, but B and N look more like my older sisters and me than A did.  R certainly looked like us and D did when he was thinner.  It’s not just us Goodwin cousins, but it includes many of the children and grandchildren of Lizzie’s siblings.  But I more than the rest of the cousins have the deep set eyes.

Brodsky family from Kiev

As I thought about the family look or traits I was thinking about how much Marc Chagall’s wife, Vava Brodsky and Lizzie looked alike.  So I just spent the past couple of hours going through articles about Chagall on the web.  Chagall is my favorite painter so I enjoyed looking at the images of the paintings.  I really enjoy the ethereal quality of his work and the colors.  I found plenty of pictures of Chagall, but no photos of Vava-in all of the articles about her or them the photos had been extracted.  I did come up with this painting of Vava.

I learned that she was from Kiev, as was Lizzie, but I don’t know the actual town.  Chagall had commented, “I have another wife-the third-from the Brodsky family itself from Kiev”.  The Brodsky’s were sugar magnates.  The writer Shalom Aleichem who wrote The Tales of Tevya, better known as Fiddler on the Roof, worked for this family. 

I don’t know if my family is this group of Brodsky’s, but it brings to mind Lizzie’s story of getting off the boat at Ellis Island and being asked if they had any money and her father pulled out his money belt to show that they did.  In the Ellis Island logs it showed that they came with $150-more than any of the other immigrants on the ship, and what was a lot of money in 1904 when they arrived on December 15^th on the Hekla that shipped out of Copenhagen.

Vava was 25 years younger than Chagall.  She was his muse and he felt she was extremely beautiful and highly intelligent.  Nothing wrong with that.  Those are good qualities for men to notice.  I certainly like being noticed for both, but sometimes, especially now as I’m getting older, I’ll take the beautiful over the intelligent.

I also found this painting of a chicken that goes along with Lizzie’s chicken rancher days.

Often when I tell people I’m interested in family history they take it to mean genealogy.  I’m not interested in that at all.  I have three Mormon cousins, (my father’s brother Jerry’s wife Merilyn is Mormon) who have eighteen children between them, to take care of that.  I don’t believe in an afterlife where we’re all together in this form of relationship for eternity.

It’s the stories

No, my interest is in the stories.  In fact, I never cared for history until I got to college and realized that it was more than names and dates and kings.  I discovered that it was about movements, art, religion and technology (yes, technology was a factor even during the Renaissance and at Cooperstown we studied folk technology).   I studied architectural history, the bible as history, the history of the decorative arts (form does follow function), popular culture, and the history of the American landscape.  I guess what I studied is now considered American Studies.

What is strange is that when I went to my interview at the Cooperstown Graduate Program Frank Spinney, the Museum Studies instructor didn’t want to accept me into the program because I hadn’t studied early American (Colonial) history.  I had to take a class in Colonial American history in my final quarter at CAL.  I did take a seminar on Colonial Latin America.  I really felt that was far more pertinent to a native San Diegan than learning about what happened in the thirteen colonies.

Great professors

I had some great instructors at CAL.  One of my favorites was Larry Levine.  I took a few classes from him, my favorite being the popular culture of the 1930′s where we saw a movie each week-Sullivan’s Travels and It Happened One Night and read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.  Another was Bob Abzug who taught my thesis seminar (my thesis was on bathing).  Bob is now at the University of Texas, Austin.

My visit with J.B. Jackson

A favorite class was J.B. Jackson’s History of the American Landscape.  I enjoyed it so much that although I had almost no interaction with him during the class (it was a huge lecture with T.A.s) I looked him up when I was in Santa Fe in 1994.

I had heard that he lived outside of Santa Fe.  I looked in the phone book and found the town where he lived.  I went there and stopped at the local museum.  After telling me that he’d probably be in the same clothes he wore in the early ‘70′s, the museum director told me where he lived and called him to tell him I was coming.  Jackson was preparing to give his papers to the College of Santa Fe and was writing about what the history of the American landscape was and had lots of questions for me as a student of his.  I spent a wonderful afternoon with J.B. Jackson talking about gardening, landscape, and life.  He died a year or so later so I’m glad I had taken the time to spend with him.

Discovering social and cultural history changed my life.  It made me appreciate that everything is history and that we are all a part of it.  Family, food, objects all make up history and that’s why I went to a history museum program at Cooperstown.

Comrades and Chicken Ranchers

One of my favorite books is an oral history of the Jewish chicken ranchers of Petaluma, CA, Comrades and Chicken Ranchers, the story of a California Jewish community by Kenneth Kann, 1993 (order the book).  I like it because it is a similar story to that of my father’s family who were chicken ranchers in Phoenix, AZ and then in San Diego, CA.  The people he interviewed sounded like my grandfather, a secular Jew who ran away from his Orthodox family, meeting my grandmother when he showed up at a relative’s home in Providence, R.I. 

They moved to Phoenix with their four children after my grandfather developed TB.  My grandmother’s family pooled together to raise the money for the travel expenses.  Much of the money was from a life insurance policy on my grandmother’s brother who had recently died.  The story my father’s cousin Reine tells is that the policy had lapsed, but my grandmother’s brother-in-law who worked for the insurance company got it reinstated.

All in a name

I never called my grandfather anything but Grandpa, although my grandmother was Lizzie. People often just called him Pop.  The thing with his name is that when his brother Izzie heard he was so sick he’d probably die the brother took his name of Irving.  My grandpa then became Irwin, because there couldn’t be two Irving Goodwin in the same family.  It was so confusing that no one used either–he was Grandpa, Pop or Mr. Goodwin.  Grandpa (the only one that I knew) lived to be 76 and died in 1971 after coming home from jury duty.

Grandpa in hat standing next to his brother Izzie/Irving.

back row:  Rozzie, Jerry, Irving, Grandpa, Lizzie.  Front row:  Robbie and Donnie.

I love working with digital photos.  I think that a big part of this has to do with the fact that I’m extremely allergic to photographic chemistry.  I think that it’s specifically the fixer (formaldehyde).  When I wrote my master’s thesis in the early 1980′s–before PhotoShop® and before having a personal computer–I had such a bad allergic reaction I had to have someone print the contact sheets for me.

color and exposure correction

The main reason I love working with digital photos is that I can work with them and correct the color and exposure and crop out what shouldn’t be there.  At Amy’s memorial I had a photo that was a poor quallity family picture taken in 1967 at Disneyland .  I cropped it so much that it turned into a good picture of five year old Amy.  Yes, it sometimes takes hours to really get something from what originally is nothing, but as I mentioned in my blog about Amy, I was able to take an extremely underexposed slide that needed a lot of color correction and turn it into the hit of the slide show.

A set of pictures for everyone

In the mid 1980′s my parents made copies of many of the family pictures and gave a set to each Goodwin girl.  Every Chanukah over five years we were given the photos they had copied.  It was a great gift and I appreciated them.  I put mine into Parker photo albums to make sure they were archival.

The down side of the project was the immense cost.  Even though my parents owned a camera store (Photo Imports) and got 40-60% off retail, it was a tremendously expensive endeavor.  The cost was a big part of why they did the project over a four or five year period.  They used a custom lab for the larger format negatives (2 ¼  and 4×5), but the regular film and prints they sent to the local production photo lab and often had copy prints or prints from slides made.  Prints from slides have a tendency to come out with too much contrast.  High production copy prints are often slightly distorted.  Even worse is that many of the pictures were made with bad chemistry and changed color quickly.

The two photos shown are examples of the poor quallity.  The picture on the left is green from poor chemicals and has too much contrast.  The example on the right was a copy from a Polaroid print.

As I’ve been digitizing my family photos I am able to correct the contrast and color.  I’m able to filter and improve to increase sharpness of the copy prints or from 110 prints.  I actually prefer working from the slides themselves over the prints.

Time consuming

Yes, it takes a great deal of time to scan and work with the images.  That’s why I’m not near finishing scanning my images.  There are options for scanning.  My friend HQ took his slides to Long’s Drug photo department and had them copy the slides onto a disc.  Camera shops offer this service as well. 

To do it yourself get a high quality scanner.  Most of these have 35mm slide and negative adapters (special light boxes).  This works great for 35mm slides, but with larger formats–120 and 4×5 or 5×7– you need to get a scanner with an open bed that is designed for this.  I have an Epson® 1640SU I purchased in 2001 that was designed for this purpose.

After scanning I “process” them using Adobe Photoshop Elements®.  The versions are updated regularly and are very easy to use for color and contrast correction and cropping.  You can also create slide shows with them.

I’ll write about storage in another post.

I spent a few hours today looking through boxes of my sister Amy’s photos. I boxed them up two years ago when my older sisters and I packed up her house after her death. I hadn’t looked at them since. What made me open the boxes today was that I realized that my oldest sister’s 60th birthday is Tuesday and I wanted to do a birthday salute to her. I wanted to know what pictures Amy had of sister #1 that I didn’t have.

I didn’t realize then that I would instead write this tribute to Amy. This is the sort of thing I will be writing about–how photographs capture the soul not in the manner that indigenous tribes felt that they would, but capture the soul of the person viewing the image. My soul was captured today in seeing Amy’s life in pictures.

Amy was eight years younger than me, ten years younger than L and fourteen years younger than the oldest Goodwin girl. She died in Austin, TX on January 2, 2006. She was found dead of natural causes, in bed, on January 6th after she didn’t show up at her 10 year sobriety anniversary. She had moved to Austin three months earlier after spending her life–including college and law school–in San Diego.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Amy. Two weeks ago I interviewed for a job at NOLO Press for sales of their attorney search and realized that while it wasn’t the ideal job for me, it would have been the perfect job for Amy-

• doing sales, which she as extremely good at
• to lawyers, which she was–although she hadn’t practiced law in years she remained a member of the CA bar
• for a publisher, what she had been trying to do for over a year

Amy was a writer. She wrote Lesbian romance novels. I don’t know if that’s an actual category, but that’s how I’d classify them. She posted them on a few websites and had a strong following. When she was sixteen she outed herself by leaving her journal on the coffee table and telling my parents to read it.

She had been a lawyer and had worked for Mail Boxes, Etc., but after winning a major case for them she was laid off. She then ran my parents’ camera store that specialized in used cameras. Her job transition came at the same time as her sobriety. She attached herself to Goodwin Photo and our parents. She was so attached that when she moved to Austin she packed the whole store and spent $10,000 on the move. We sold everything to a company that purchases used cameras for $4,000 and they packed and transported it all.

This picture was taken when Amy was in her early teens the day she had her wisdom teeth removed. At her memorial it received the most ahs. I took the photo without a flash, with the camera on the table, using Kodachrome^TM. I had to do a lot of doctoring using Adobe Photoshop Elements.

She wasn’t a photographer. The pictures were taken by others. What captured my soul today was seeing Amy’s life-really looking at it and sensing it. Seeing her opening Christmas presents with her former partner Denise, being at parties, the inside of her home, and her vacations. This is the side of her that I didn’t necessarily know, just as my sisters and I didn’t know until after her death that she smoked a pack a day. I had never been inside of her house. She wouldn’t let me in–even when I stopped at her house after driving five hundred miles–because it would reveal that she smoked.

I also saw what was important to her. Family was important. She had photos of Ls son Aa at birth and photos of his two daughters. There were pictures of me that I had never seen before and pictures of the family that weren’t in the photos I went through after my father died. Her great love was her cats and our family cat Pasha in particular. They were all there.

I tossed pictures of people I didn’t recognize when I packed up the boxes. What remained amounted to a few hundred pictures–a significant number to look at and to capture my soul.

Capturing the Soul

The idea for Capturing the Soul came after I began sorting through the over 10,000 photos my father took in his lifetime.  He got his first camera when he was fifteen and his family lived in Phoenix.  There are no photos of his family prior to that.  He and his family moved to San Diego in February 1939.   The photos are of his parents and siblings and of my mother and sisters and I in San Diego during the 1940′s through to the millenium.  There were thousands of pictures of plants and animals taken at the San Diego Zoo and the county fair. His navy pictures make up a few hundred images.  These were taken when he was a staff photographer for Rear Admiral A. G. Noble, on the USS Blue Ridge, AGC-2.

As I sorted the photos I saw what was there and what was missing–for example, my mother and aunts we’re rarely included with his parents and their grandchildren.  There are no photos of me as a baby–I was sick until I was five or six months old.  I also saw him change from the vibrant young man to depressed adult.  This was expressed not just in the pictures of him, but in the quality of the pictures he made.

When my cousin Ri looked through the album of family photos his comment on the photo of my father as a happy young sailor was”look, that was taken when Donnie still smiled”.

I will write about the different things I see in my family’s photos and about looking at family photos in general.  This is about looking beyond the stories to get a sense of who the subjects of the photographs really are–seeing their souls.

Exploring Family Photos

Looking through the photos and identifying, cleaning, archiving, and scanning them is a long process.  I still only have a fraction of the photos scanned.  Unfortunately for this process, my oldest sister now has custody of most of the photos.

I will write on what to do with all of the pictures–of storage materials, formats, and ways to date and identify the subjects.

I will give tips on using family photos  as a way to write a family history and as a tool to draw information for an oral history.

My parents met in 1946 at an organization for single Jews that my uncle Robbie nicknamed The Last Chance Club.  The photo to the left is of my parents Don and Bev on a Last Chance Club picnic taken sometime in early 1947.