Wellington Road

A flower a day for January . Today's are a bit obscure.... I'd forgotten that our Wellington Road house originally had redwood siding on the back. And that decorative tree is long gone. Roger Dinda 1975 Camera: Argus C3

Joan on the deck at Mom's house a couple years ago. We were repainting that deck in preparation for selling the place. Since I mentioned the changes to the house in a caption a couple days ago, I thought I'd show 'em. It's a great house; I trust the new owners appreciate it.

Mom--Hattie Dinda--liked lighthouse pictures. I was trying to capture a sense of the large, open room at the heart of Mom's house. The light was perfect....

Me and m' bike , early in 1978 when I was still skinny, and the bike was still fairly new. Note the stylish red shorts, the equally stylish red knicker sox, the blue arm warmers, and the style-resistant MSR bicycle helmet. The jersey advertised BikeCentennial--now Adventure Cycling. Oh, yeah: My hair was longer, back then. And my beard hadn't gone grey. The bike was blue in 1978. It will soon be blue again. Mom and Dad's house is in the background, before they replaced the porch with a deck and before they paved the drive. Dad took the photo; no idea what the camera was.

My brother the birthday boy, sometime in 1978, on his bike. Gosh he was a skinny kid back then. He's posed on Wellington Road, in front of Mom & Dad's house . That yellow helmet was built by Mountain Safety Research ; it was adapted from a climbing helmet MSR sold at the time. Richard's saved his life when he was hit by a drunk driver and landed on the back of his head; when Dick traded it in for a new brain bucket they reported they'd not previously seen a helmet with back-of-the-head damage. Dick's about as hard-line about good helmets as anyone I know.... Roger Dinda photograph; unknown camera. Dick: Do you remember what Dad replaced the Argus with? Scanned from a print.

This doll lived on the wall above the fireplace at Mom's house, as did the porcelain geese. Rather than a proper mantle, the fireplace had three stone shelves.... From the same roll of film as the Springport pix. Somehow these got mixed in with a bunch of my Dad's pictures. Not sure how that happened, but it's been fun recovering them. Camera: Minolta Freedom 100

Today'd have been my mother's 92nd birthday. Thought I'd post her picture. Here she is on Christmas day in 2002. She was 76 years old and dying from cancer.

My brother, on his bike, summer of 1978, on Wellington Road in Kalamazoo. Dad was standing in our yard when he took this photo; it's part of a set with all three (adult) kids riding back and forth. Dick's bike was custom built by Matt Assenmacher of Swartz Creek. The color's a bit off; it was actually bright orange. 'Twas truly a great bicycle.