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Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (709-712)


See the previous post in this series here.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These are pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that we found after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.

This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a close family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date.

None of the photos in this set are labeled or dated. They appear to have been taken in a river/lake area in the Pacific Northwest and were probably taken in the late 1950s or early 1960s.

I can't quite read the name of the boat in the second photo. Stranger II registered somewhere in British Columbia? That's by best guess anyway. Searching for a boat of that name led me to a type of ship called the Fairmile Motor Launch Type B. These were used in World War II as anti-submarine boats and later for other types of missions. Some were refitted for other purposes after the war and it looks like this could be one of those based on the pictures I've seen though I'm no expert. If so, it was delivered to the RCN on March 27th 1942. In 1946, it was sold to Coal Island Limited, Vancouver and renamed Stranger II. In 1966 it was destroyed by fire.













The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can also be found here.


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