Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (1086-1089)

See the previous post in this series here.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These 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 many thousands of these slides. 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 from the 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 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.

The first photo shows a family in what is probably their future new home while under construction.

The second photo shows a kitchen in what is possible a new home. Neither this nor the previous photo is dated or labeled but they appear to be to be from the late 1970s or very early 1980s. I guess they could be from earlier in the 1970s.

The third photo shows a house and while not terribly interesting on its own I found it interesting because I found the house in Google Maps. You can clearly see the address on the mailbox and it is a unique enough address that this was the first hit. It is in Aurora, Colorado and according to Zillow, the house was built in 1972. Based on the fact that there appear to be newly planted trees, I'm guessing this photo was taken when the house was fairly new.

~1972

The same house "today" (latest Google Maps has anyway)

The final photos was processed in June 1966 and shows a river bank.

processed June 1966

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