The Grand Tour 02: Kodachrome Slides from the Pacific, 1947-1950

Guam

My dad worked for PIE engineering company on Guam for two assignments, 1947-1949 and 1949-1950. In mid-1949, he had returned to Massachusetts but was unable to find a suitable job there, so off he went to Guam again. There, he lived in a Quonset hut on the US Navy base in Agaña, now called Hagåtña.  

In those days, flying from Honolulu to Guam was a long trip, requiring two stops for refueling.

It is a long way to anywhere from Guam (note the New England road map)

Honolulu to Guam route

Ready to fly at NAS Hagåtña (Agana), now the A.B. Won Pat International Airport

I am not sure if my dad flew with these people of if he was just wishing them goodbye. The massive airplane in the background is a Pan American Boeing 377 Stratocruiser. It was luxurious and comfortable but suffered from two major flaws: high fuel use and propellers that tended to crack and disintegrate in flight. 

The PIE Camp was rather basic. The engineers had their own living quarters, consisting of half of a Quonset hut. They had no air conditioning, but the mess hall and cinema were cooled. When it rained, there was mud. The jeeps were mostly wrecks that broke regularly. 

 

Minor hole in the road

 

My dad told me that when he and other engineers went up-country to look at watersheds or survey, two armed soldiers accompanied them because there were still Japanese soldiers living in the forest. 

Yap Island

Yap is an island group that is part of the Caroline Islands of the western Pacific. Now it is a state within the Federated States of Micronesia. In 1948, the US held the Caroline Islands as the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands.

My dad flew there in January 1948 on a PBY Catalina flying boat to do a quick inspection of water sources and aquifers. He saw the round stone money disks, used as a symbol of wealth by local families. From Wikipedia, "... stone money, known as Rai, or Fei: large doughnut-shaped, carved disks of (usually) calcite, up to 4 m (13 ft) in diameter (most are much smaller). The smallest can be as little as 3.5 centimetres (1.4 in) in diameter. Many of them were brought from other islands, as far as New Guinea, but most came in ancient times from Palau."

 

Oops, a bit of mud. Local gents are helping.

Stone money lining a path

Impressive stone money samples

This ends this short look at the Pacific in the 1940s. We will continue on to Hong Kong when my dad finished his one-year contract and headed west.

I think he used an American Perfex camera for these Kodachrome slides. I scanned them with a Nikon Coolscan 5000ED scanner. Considering their age, the slides were in remarkable condition. He bought his Leica IIIC at the post exchange in early 1950. I do not know what happened to the Perfex. 

From the Archives: July 4, 1944, celebrations, Post Island, Massachusetts

The family beach cottage (house), Post Island, Quincy, Massachusetts, USA

My dad spent part of World War II in Puerto Rico working for the US Navy. He was a civilian engineer, and when the project ended, he returned home to Boston. His sister and brother-in-law owned a cottage (house) on the shore at Post Island, a section of the Hough's Neck Peninsula that projects out into Massachusetts Bay. He joined them and the other beach residents for old-fashioned 4th of July celebrations.

Uncle Cliff and the horseshoes

The Penny search in the sand

Aunt Mary at the potato race

Watermelon consumption contest

Costume contest

Tennis champions with non-tennis shoes

Enjoying a short one in a genuine woody station wagon

Dianne enjoying a mackerel

Dulcie, Aunt Mary, and Joe on the beach

These Kodachromes record a world that looks so ordinary, so Americana. Children are enjoying a holiday at the beach. The gents are building an addition to a house. Girls are playing tennis. The very innocence of these scenes is the point. 

War was waging on three continents. Terrific battles were being waged on the Pacific Islands, in France and China, and on the horrifying Eastern Front. Civilians in China and Russia were starving. Most families in these pictures had a relative or neighbor overseas or on the oceans. 

But in Massachusetts on this sunny July day, life looked so normal. There was no destruction, hunger, or fear. The houses were neat and intact. The lights were on. By 1944, civilians could buy butter, sugar, coffee, and gasoline, although the latter may have still been rationed. The miseries of war seemed far away.

In total contrast, in 1944, my mother was a child in Berlin. Life there was much more brutal. Hunger and the secret police were constant threats.

My dad was able to afford and buy 35mm Kodachrome film and use it for family snapshots. Possibly he had bought the rolls at the navy post exchange on Puerto Rico before he returned to the mainland, but regardless, he felt secure enough in its availability to use it for casual photographs. It underscores the amazing capability of our industrial output. 

Update: 1946 on Post Island

My dad took these photographs on the original 35mm Kodachrome film. I think the film speed was Weston 8 or approximately ASA 10. I am not sure if he used an electronic light meter then. The camera might have been his Perfex, made by the Candid Camera Corporation of Chicago, Illinois, with unknown 50mm lens. I scanned these slides on my Nikon CoolScan 5000 film scanner, operated by NikonScan software on a Windows 7 computer.

From the Archives: Boston, Massachusetts, in 1944

My father spent part of the World War II working for the US Navy in Puerto Rico. He returned to Boston in 1944 when his contract was over. He had always been a keen photographer and took many pictures of relatives and their friends. I looked through his Kodachrome slides and found only four of Boston. He probably thought that everyone photographed Boston and that mundane city scenes were uninteresting. It is a pity, because mundane street scenes take on a documentary importance as the years and decades pass.

Charles River from Cambridge, Massachusetts

Boston and Charles River from Cambridge

Boston Garden and Swan Boat (pedaled by human power)

Boston harbor, Anscochrome transparency

These photographs look so innocent, so tourist-like. But consider the geopolitical conditions of 1944. The world was at war. In the Soviet Union, Soviet armies were painfully beating back the German army in immense battles during which tens of thousands on both side perished. Russian and Ukrainian peasants were starving in their destroyed villages, and German civilians in the homeland were also close to malnutrition. In the Pacific, American troops were slowly clearing islands of Japanese occupiers at horrifying cost. In China, millions were starving. But in Massachusetts, children sailed on the Charles River, and the Boston Garden was clean and blooming with flowers. A civilian could buy Kodachrome film and get it processed. (It is possibly that my dad bought the Kodachrome at the Navy base in Puerto Rico at his former job, but nevertheless, he felt secure enough in its availability to take casual pictures.) War must have felt far away, although Americans were unified in beating the Axis powers.

I believe these photographs were from his American-made Perfex 35mm camera. In the future, I need to scan many more of my dad's 1944 frames of family events and casual gatherings.

I have written about Boston before (click this link about Quincy Market). I wish I had taken far more pictures of ordinary scenes. You can also type "Boston" in the search box.

From the archives: New York City in 1942

I recently looked through some family boxes of photographs and found a steel Kodak film can with tightly rolled film. It was a short roll of nitrate film, possibly untouched since it was developed in 1942. It recorded one of my dad's trips to Washington and New York City.

This is one of the Elevated (El) Lines, somewhere in Lower Manhattan.

The monumental building with a statue on top is the Municipal Building at 1 Centre Street in Lower Manhattan. Built between 1907 and 1914, it houses City of New York offices. It may have been the inspiration for the Stalin-era Seven Sisters office buildings in Moscow. Warsaw also has one of these somber buildings, "donated" by Marshal Stalin to the supposedly-grateful people of occupied Poland. The tall building on the right is the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse at 40 Centre Street. It was originally known as the Foley Square Courthouse but was renamed in 2001 to honor Mr. Marshall.

The elegant Art Deco Cities Service Building, now known as 70 Pine Street, is 67 stories or 952 feet tall. It was built in 1931-32 by the Cities Service Company (oil and gas).

George Washington presides over the monumental stairs at the US Treasury building. This is now the Federal Hall National Memorial at 26 Wall Street. General Washington took his first Oath of Office here, and the building at one time housed the Congress, Supreme Court, and executive offices of the United States government.

Trinity Church is at 75 Broadway and can be seen at the end of Wall Street. This is the third Trinity Church on the site. Construction began in 1839 and it was completed in 1846.

Slightly off the topic: this is Memorial Continental Hall, owned & operated by the Daughters of the American Revolution, in Washington, DC.

To the best of my knowledge, this roll of film dates to early 1942, but my dad's notes are incomplete. The camera was an American-made Perfex, from the Candid Camera Corporation of Chicago. It may have been equipped with a Wollensak lens. I scanned the Nitrate film frames with a Plustek 7600i 35mm film scanner using SilverFast Ai software. The negatives have scratches, but unfortunately the infrared iSRD function does not work with real black and white film. Consider that despite the flaws, there is still data on this film that can be extracted 64 years later. Will our digital files last that long? (Answer, dream away.)

This is a 1996 Kodachrome photograph of the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse.  I was on the roof of an office building occupied by the State of New York's Department of State at 270 Broadway. This file came from a Kodak Photo CD, which was an early attempt to provide a convenient way to show photographs on a television set. A film laboratory developed the film and then scanned the frames onto a CD. The user could insert the CD into a small player, somewhat like a VCR player. The scans technically should have been excellent, but my experience was mixed. Some contractors did distinctly mediocre work. Now, it is difficult to find a software package to open the proprietary Kodak format and correctly decode the colors.