At first glance, there's nothing particularly extraordinary about these pictures. Almost everyone has key family moments captured and preserved in one form or another.
These photos were taken by my parents shortly after they were married and began raising our family in Gibsonia, Pennsylvania, during the early to mid- sixties.
They captured birthdays, holidays, baptisms, and vacations on their preferred medium-- Kodachrome slides. Note: Everyone under 30 can click here to learn about this mysterious Kodak product pre-dating digital cards.
However, these pictures are extraordinary because in reality they shouldn't still exist. These slides should have been incinerated into ashes when a fire burned our house to the ground in June 1965.
The fire was devastating, but thankfully we weren't in the house when it caught fire from what is believed to be a faulty electrical circuit in the basement. When my parents returned to the wreckage days later they searched for what little remained. Very little survived the fire, including two of our dogs who never had a chance of escape.
What they did find was stunning. Nearly two dozen slides in a paper bag somehow were miraculously intact. The cardboard mounts were only slightly charred. Even to this day there is a faint smell of smoke on them.
But the images themselves remained crisp, colorful and you would never imagine they survived a fire that melted metal pipes and turned most everything into a dark ash.
How did these images survive? Or, more importantly, why are these slides still with us 53 years later? As a photographer I can't give a logical, satisfying answer to those questions, because it defies logic. Kodachrome was a wonderful product, but it wasn't indestructible.
Maybe it's a reminder that really terrible things happen and you just have to live with fact you'll never know why houses burn and destroy everything you owned.
Or, as my parents liked to say, the charred slides remind us that every person in these pictures had also survived what could have been a worse tragedy.
There were more birthdays, baptisms, marriages, and vacations that would be captured for future family photo albums.
Kodachrome is extraordinary in its own way.
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