Daddy’s 5,840 Slides

| Flower Roberts

I got the neighbor’s children to help move all the boxes of slides and the three projectors to one place in the basement. I was tired of looking at them every day. They have been downstairs for months now. I am finally strong enough to go down the steps. I went down yesterday to look and take photos. I need to know what is ahead of me.

The slide closet in the basement.

Each box with a reel in it potentially holds 140 slides. There are 41 reel boxes and a shoe box of little boxes and random letters. That means there could be 5,840 slides.

Three projectors and more slides.

My sister and I purged hundreds of inherited slides when we emptied our parents’ house. These inherited slides were mostly of people we did not know in places we had not been. There were even hundreds of double slides and a binocular stereoscope viewer. At first we were careful and respectful in our purging. By the end we were thinking these folks were self-absorbed and took way too many photos of their dog and cat.

My plan is to purge and color-code these thousands of slides while I am snowed in this winter. I will keep a fire going in Daddy’s big stove as I sort through sixty years of slides. This sounds like a great way to spend snowy days. Mr. Flower bought me a lovely blue Lodge pan for cooking on the stove if there is a power outage. Daddy would have loved that.

I have done some sorting before when old friends were coming to stay here on the mountain. We hiked Grandfather Mountain with this family in our younger years. We made a slide show just for them. Their color was purple.

It was a wonderful visit. The last before my parents passed. We suspected such and wanted it to be perfect.

I am determined not to leave this purging task for my children to tackle. I will confess that the inheritance of stuff has changed the course of my life. I do not want my two children to be overwhelmed by what I leave behind. They have too much stuff of their own right now.

I will bravely tackle this task for the sake of the family that follows, so they won’t have to wonder,  ‘”Who are these folks? Where are they? and ” Who is that spoiled beagle in all these photos?”

FLOWER and the slides

17 thoughts on “Daddy’s 5,840 Slides”

  2. Been there – done that. My late Father-In-Law was an amateur photographer who took pictures of EVERYONE! He kept copies of ALL OF THEM! (Most are not identified with names.) We inherited thousands of photos and slides when he passed. It has been quite the project to sort through.

    I, too, don’t want to leave all this to my kids & grandkids. It does change what you save.

    Good luck!

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  3. Wow. That’s a lot of slides. I’m working through similar stashes of our own. Thanks for the reminder and encouragement to not let this type of project become something our children will have to deal with later down the road of life.

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    1. I know I will find treasure. We used to have a slide show on the nights we spent at the mountain house. Boxes were moved as we went through them. Those were fun times. Now, my parents are gone, aunts and uncles and two cousins gone also.
      It is really important to organize and save these for future slide show nights. I will color code into groups…hiking, boy scouts, ball teams, beach camping, mountain camping, Dudley gatherings, Roberts gatherings

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  6. I have been doing a similar project. I am scanning my Dad’s slides. He does not have as many as your dad, and my Mom did a good job of documenting. Now that I live in a cold climate, I’m hoping to get more done this winter…as soon as I finish unpacking.

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      1. Here it is in the mid-50s to 30s. Houston is running low 80s to high 60s. I dug up some plants and brought as many potted as I could. I was able to give away some of my really large pots to some young plant enthusiasts who were very happy to get them. I had a really nice ginger collection and had to leave most them. I hate to think about it, but I’m sure the twelve beds of plants in my gardens have probably been removed.

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  7. Excellent Flower, it seems we are in that time frame of purging and clearing out .. I only said to our children last week, we are clearing out ‘Stuff’ so you will not have to when the time comes ‘ 🙂
    Sending love and Hugs your way xx

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