During the holidays, I was looking through boxes of old photos at my parents’ house when I came across an old red wallet crammed full of small Polaroids taken from the mid- to late 1960s. They feature me, the little boy in the photos, and my family as we lived and played more than 50 years ago.
I had not seen most of the photos before, so it was a wonderful find. They seem to be primarily taken around the time of my fourth birthday in 1967.
I cannot remember the moments pictured, but I can remember the sound of the camera and the smell of the photos after they developed. The camera was very likely a Polaroid Swinger, the popular mid-1960s instant camera that produced small black-and-white prints.
Those older Polaroids used peel-apart instant film. After taking the picture, you pulled the film out, waited for it to develop, then peeled the print away from the negative/backing. The process used developer and fixer chemicals inside the film packet, which is what caused that unique, chemical smell.
Phyllis Robinson, a pioneering DDB copywriter and later a Creative Hall of Fame inductee came up with the name “The Swinger” and suggested showing it swinging from a girl’s wrist. When someone said the client would never buy the name, her response was:
The people at Polaroid’s Cambridge headquarters might not know what a swinger is, but “the kids will.”1
Although my parents’ ancestors had lived and farmed the same land in Haywood County, Tennessee, since the early 1830s, they became part of the postwar baby boomer trend of leaving farms and rural communities for cities and suburbs.
They purchased one of the first lots in Parkway Village, a planned community in Memphis that, at the time, was mostly cotton fields and dirt roads.
Rather than working hard in a field from dawn to dusk, six days a week, as their ancestors had for generations, my dad went to an office and my mom stayed home to take care of the house, my little sister Heather and me. The photos show they had time and a little money for vacations, games and visits with friends. We had a backyard and a German Shepard named Pal.
My parents joined nearby Southland Baptist Church which is where they met a group of close friends with whom they are still friends to this day.
My parents were given nothing and worked hard for the life they built together. These photos open a small door into that world and give me a glimpse of what my first few years of life were like.
- Nora Draper, “Searching for Winks and Nods: The Complications of Analyzing Corporate Intent in Historic Branding Campaigns,” International Journal of Communication 7 (2013): 2547–2559, https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/download/2253/1026/9951. ↩︎
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