Behind the Times

I am behind a week on my reporting.

Last Saturday marked the closest passing of the moon to the earth in 18 years. The first cameras arrived at 5:10 for a 7:15 moon rise. I had been anticipating the angles for 10 days and thought I had my spots picked out. I had two film cameras ready and the digital on a tripod to move around with me in the car. The film is still in the camera so I can't fill you in on those results just yet. There was a collective gasp as the moon rose and I was in the Tower. The first shot below has an orange glow that will stick with me as unusual. What you see on the left of the image is the Light as it turned. The second is a long exposure I got two hours into the event.















A better view of the real story was sent to me by a colleague. Kevin Black is a long time Whitman Hanson teacher who clearly has a handle on photography. The collage below is made from two different images.



When I went out to count how many people had gathered I got up to 150 before I stopped counting. Once again this is the place to gather when nature presents the fantastic.

The story the next day was of a seal on the beach. Haley took the shots you see.







This guy (or girl, for all I know) was about 40 inches long, grey, brown and white. He sunned himself on the rocks for twenty minutes or so then maneuvered himself around for a swim away. He headed toward Jericho Road happily it seemed. I had thought we were past the season for such a visit. I was pleased to be surprised.

New to Me

Several images to share that I discovered today in the archives of the Little Red Schoolhouse.



This is an image of the Living room in the Cottage in 1982. I have seen this green when opening the windows that overlook the harbor. The Gillis family was in residence that year and, not surprisingly, they kept a nice place.



This image is the room I am working in as I type. The painting remains here but is on a different wall. The spinning wheel is no longer part of the setting. I can tell it is this room by the notch in the corner beam.

This week I caught up with Jesse Cole Minehan Morrell who lived in the Cottage in the early 1960's. She shared some memories of the Tower being largely off limits to she and her sister Nancy. She also remembered knocks on the window and requests for tours that her mother turned away. After her marriage she returned to the Lighthouse with her two boys as she and her husband built a house. This was just before the Society took the site over and she recalls the Cottage as a Spartan place to live. I have been hoping to track down some pictures from those years but she was not hopeful. Maybe she'll surprise me when we get together again.



On a more positive note I share this picture. This image was marked on the reverse, "Photo by Wellington Furlong, 1961" I hate to argue with late Colonel but Haley and I have concluded that these two young women are the same two young woman who appear in a set of photos from 1936. The 1936 collection highlights a number of events that commemorated the 300th anniversary of Scituate and are very clearly of that occasion. This image gives me a great deal of hope all the same, as it was new to me. I am looking for images from this period and that today I found one I did not know about grants me a reason to be optimistic that I might find more. I so much want to discover a photograph of the store that was run here by the Cushmans and the Cobbetts. The goal is to bring that room into the open house tours and share the twentieth century stories better than we currently do.

My newest scans will go back into the archives tomorrow. I will start digging again when I am there.