Month: July 2016

Iowa – Fall 1974: Upper & Lower Magnolia Farms

About midway through high school, the family moved to a different county, acquiring a farm in the hills near the tiny community of Magnolia.  Then a second farm two or three miles away was added to the holdings, this one located near a creek that flowed through a valley.   I drove to Iowa in the fall of 1974 from Los Angeles, slowly meandering along off-interstate, secondary roads the whole way (the Land Rover was capable of almost 55 mph downhill,  sometimes) and I wanted to photograph as I went (haven’t found those negatives yet).  Then I left the Land Rover parked in an Iowa shed after a few days and flew off to other easterly destinations for a time.

Magnolia?  More here and here, but not much.  Be skeptical of statements like that from epodunk.com, describing Magnolia as “a city in Harrison County, in the Omaha-Council Bluffs metro area.”  Magnolia is a tiny village in a strikingly and absolutely rural area, at least 40 or 50 miles from Omaha or Council Bluffs.  The nearest “city” is Logan, county seat with population of about 1500.

Bonus photograph:  I found this lo-res snapshot from about 1961 or ’62 of my 1939 Ford Deluxe Coupe (then equipped with Oldsmobile V8 and running gear,  tuck & roll upholstery, and oversize BFGoodrichs on the rear), parked in front of the lower Magnolia farm house garage.  Note that the tree on the right side of the photo is the same tree that appears at the left hand of the frame in the “Lower Farm” photo above which shows resting cattle with the Land Rover at right foreground.
39Ford

rDay Four-Hundred-Seventy-Nine: Crazy Days

Annual “Crazy Days” car show today.  Biggest show I’ve seen here; a few hundred cars.  Bright sun, hard light, harsh shadows.  Couldn’t find that many items of interest, nor could I make photographs the way I wanted, but it was probably just because I got out of bed on the wrong side … Nevertheless, I clicked off a few in about an hour.  Here are some examples.

Pokemon Go

While strolling about yesterday, I came upon a curious scene at an intersection — one that I failed to document, and am not sure how I effectively could.  Three guys were on the sidewalk, all with smartphones in hand.  They were exchanging comments with a couple, also smartphoned-up, in a pickup, idling and lingering at the intersection.  When I got closer, I could see that they were excitedly discussing, what else, Pokemon Go.  Completely oblivious to anything else around them, traffic included.

rDay Four-Hundred-Seventy-Eight

Experiencing dogs.  Visiting the landscape-nursery place.  Walking downtown.  Seeing old colleagues, including Erik who has taken over the incredible project to programmatically pull data from an old unified data system and prepare it for inhalation by another totally alien system — a truly daunting project some of us imagined and visualized for years but did not have the courage (or time) to come to grips with it (see Erik’s chart below that illustrates about one-third of all the data tables and elements and their relationships in the old system).  Just looking around.