The year was 1953 and my dad didn’t go to Alaska.

As you may remember, in September 2017, we quickly moved my mom and dad into our home. The decision was made on a Monday and the move took place on Friday, just two days before Hurricane Irma hit.

In our haste, we couldn’t go through everything. There wasn’t time or energy for that. My dad micromanaged the move, so that meant lots of stuff that we wanted to throw away was kept, including every slide, movie and photograph he ever took. These couldn’t be left in their home because of the threat of Irma. We’d have to go through them later.

Later came this past weekend. We joined in with the neighborhood garage sale in order to get rid of a large glass patio table and chairs. It was the perfect time. They do the advertising and we put our stuff out. I figured I might as well go through the rest of the house to clear out some things that have gone unused since we moved 3.5 years ago.

That didn’t take long and it felt good to lighten the load, but then Mom asked if I wanted to go through her closet.

Dun, dun, dun!!!

My parents have two very different philosophies of stuff. Mom is a pitcher and Dad is a keeper. Many a time he would go to the curb to retrieve something that Mom deemed useless. Mom is always ready to thin out the stuff. She’s a great example for me, but going through all that stuff…

I hadn’t really looked in there since Dad died and we sold their home. There were pictures and slides and movies. Oh my! I gathered my courage and went in. On the floor were three metal boxes. I don’t even remember seeing them before! I tried to lift one and nearly threw my back out. I scooted it and peered inside, and oh boy did it smell bad. This was a job for Bob.

Bob is great in so many ways, not the least of them being his sense of smell is not as keen as mine. But he did notice a musky odor, so he knew my super-sniffer must have been going nuts.

There were three of these things. This is the small one – it held nine movie reels. I thoughtlessly threw away the other two before taking pictures. They each held a dozen reels and probably would have been of value to a collector with a poor sense of smell.

The first label I came across said Alaska 1953. As I looked over the collection, I was surprised that Dad had not forced us kids, I mean offered for us to watch these. He was infamous for showing us stuff we didn’t want to see whenever it was time for home-movie night. Home-movie night was not limited to movies. In those days, slides were all the rage. We wanted to see pictures of ourselves when we were little and cute, and he wanted to see Hawaii, something I came to appreciate in my adult life.

Dad had hundreds of carousels of slides, but those from business trips to Hawaii were always on the top of the stack. Landscape after landscape after landscape – mostly in living black and white.

But I digress. I asked my mom, “Did Dad go to Alaska in 1953?”

“Oh, no,” she replied. “All of those movies belonged to your great Uncle Hayward. I don’t think we ever looked at them.”

Uncle Hayward died in 1978 at the age of 79, which leads me to believe those movies traveled from Arizona where they lived, to Maryland and then probably to Florida where they have been stored in their fancy, smelly humidors for over forty years. That’s right – the cans which I pitched were labeled as humidors. I don’t think they were meant to hold up for over six decades though – at least that’s what I gathered from the smell of deteriorating film and musty metal, which was akin to the smell of aged Tupperware with leftover cabbage in it.

All in all, it was a successful weekend. We sold our table so we didn’t have to figure out how to haul it away. We got rid of a lot of things from Mom’s closet and found a few gems, too. Like this pair of movie projectors, which you see Bob examining here. One is for the movies which we threw away. I think someone could make a lamp out of it and it probably has some value, which will be determined.

Notice the projector in the foreground. You do find some interesting things among your parents’ possessions.

Plus, best of all. I threw out all the slides of Hawaii and found some cute ones of me and my siblings. If I can ever figure how to digitize them, I’ll be sure to share them!