My brother Jay took this picture of me in the back yard in San Antonio, as I displayed a bit of regional pride. I have no memory of it, but it was about 50 years ago. This is the unretouched image.

This is a bit retouched, using the simple program I have on my laptop. It will never be a great image, but then again not bad for one taken with an Instamatic 104, the print of which has been sitting in a photo album for decades.

A monochromic version, which has its interests.

One more, using one of the buttons that comes with photo editing system. I played around with it until I found one I liked.

A nearby photo processing shop, Fox Photo, developed the film, and at that time always put the month and year on the edge, along with its red fox mascot. JUN 71 it says, but that doesn’t mean the photo was taken then.

I have another photo from the same batch taken at my grandmother’s house. That one had to have been taken before she died, which was in January 1971. So maybe the back yard image is from the same summer, I assume 1970. On the other hand, the camera could have easily taken pictures on the same roll of 24 or 36 images both summers. We didn’t take a lot of pictures, and sometimes the camera would sit around for a long time before a roll was used up.

Anyway, ca. 1971 is close enough. A nice, round 50 years. It occurs to me looking at my much younger self that a lot can happen to a fellow over that many years.