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.
Apparently, 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 I acquired 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 friend or 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 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.
Click on one of the images or the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.
These photos seem to be some of the oldest I have come across. The first one might not be as old as the others. Obviously it is from Christmas, but it is probably from the late 1950s or early 1960s. However, the other three appear to be from the 1940s based on their somewhat cryptic labels and appear to have been taken at a horse track somewhere. The flags all have "W.P." which may be what one of the labels refers to. A quick google search revealed a White Pines County horse race that's been going on since 1934 in Nevada. Could be that's where these were taken but it isn't obvious to me. Honestly, I'm a bit skeptical these were taken in the 1940s. Kodachrome film had been around for a few years by then though so it is possible and I don't know what else the 1941 and 1942 these slides are labeled with would refer to. I'm not enough of a fashion expert to be able to tell if the clothes are 1940s vintage.
WP 1941 - flags on roof
AP 1941 - BFL
WP 1942 - Crowd - Derby Day 1942
The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can also be found here.
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