Month: November 2023

EXPLORING the NEEDLES in 1949: With Filmmakers Ray & Jinny Garner (ZX#90)

by stiles • November 26, 2023 • 10 Comments

NOTE: You’ll notice that the quality of these images is not the best, but their historical value is priceless. The original 16mm film was badly degraded by the time anyone thought to digitize it. Still, despite the grainy, slightly blurred images, and those vertical scratches, I could look at these pictures all day. When you reach the end of the still images, note that there is a link to the film itself. There’s no sound, so do your own narration. But these images are worth thousands of words, coming as they do, from another time…Enjoy the ride

DALLAS, TEXAS: 11.22.1963…And the Dwindling Few Who Still Remember —Jim Stiles (ZX#89)

by stiles • November 19, 2023 • 22 Comments

The National Geographic story was called “The Last Full Measure,” and was written by its president and editor, Melvin Bell Grosvenor. He began…

“His life was such — the radiance he shed —that if we live to be a hundred, we will remember how he graced this earth, and how he left it. Only the future can assign to John Fitzgerald Kennedy his true place in history, But this I know. When men now boys are old, in distant time beyond the year 2000, they will say, ‘I remember I remember when they brought him home, the murdered President, from Dallas…’

“Again and again the story will be told —just as I recall my Grandfather Grosvenor, at 92 telling me graphically of how, as a young student at Amherst College in Massachusetts , he traveled by horse and train to the bier of the martyred Lincoln.”

I still have that copy of the National Geographic. I keep it on a shelf of books and artifacts — touchstones from my life. Meaningful to me, but few others.

CRESCENT JCT. MEMORIES: A Tribute to Dad…by Colleen Wimmer (ZX#88)

by stiles • November 12, 2023 • 5 Comments

Where the old highway meets the interstate, at the narrowest point between the roads and the railroad, sits a meager cafe, an Amoco station, and a little community—two houses, three trailers and a horse corral, to be exact.

Before the highway was built, long before the freeway was even invented, this little community was just a switching station. And when Dad came with his father and family in June of ’47 to build a business there, it was called Brendell. Old timers still call it Brendell, but Grandad named it Crescent, for the bend the railroad tracks take along the flatland. It doesn’t resemble much of a switching station anymore. An extra row of tracks and old loading ramps are all that remain. Now it’s a truckstop whose backyard is cluttered with old cars—relics from the fifties and sixties, piles of ties, empty bomb boxes from World War II, and an assortment of someday useful junk that has found its home there.

MAY 1972: A CANYON COUNTRY ‘MOMENT IN TIME’ via the U.S. National Archives (ZX#87)

by stiles • November 5, 2023 • 18 Comments

According to the NARA site, “In 1972 David Hiser was one of several photographers chosen by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to document locations in the United States as part of the DOCUMERICA Project. Over 460 of Hiser’s photos can now be found in the National Archives Catalog.” Hiser moved to Aspen, Colorado when he was 25 years old, and would enjoy a successful career as a photographer, including 66 contributions to National Geographic.

Here is a selection from those images that feature Moab, Utah and the Canyon Country of southeast Utah. I arrived in Moab just months after Hiser completed his photo work and have added my own commentary to his photos…JS