Today's CoolPhoto 4/17/2019
It seems we all loved I Love Lucy, and this extended to our young family as well. We had a small black and white set in the kitchen and my wife tuned it to the Lucy reruns to provide what she called “white noise” to get through the inevitable chaos of the dinner hour with four small children. This is my daughter Therese at 10 years old mugging with the TV. She and her sisters named the puppy after Ethel and Fred Mertz.
Tacoma is a world-class container port, but in the early days it shipped lumber to San Francisco on schooners built along the shores of Commencement Bay. My grandfather and his sons operated two shipyards beginning in 1914. The first, called Western Boat Building, could build vessels up to 90 feet overall. The second, Petrich Shipbuilding, could build vessels more than 150 feet in length. It was innovative as an assembly line factory of ships. Both yards burned in huge fires and we are out of the shipbuilding business altogether.
Tacoma is the port of export for wheat and other grains grown on the east side of the Cascade mountains. The grains are brought by train to an enormous elevator on the shores of Commencement Bay. Huge bulk freighters sail to Tacoma to load the grain from the elevator, and often these ships have to wait for a berth to receive cargo. Most of the grain is destined for Asia. The silos in the photograph are much smaller than the grain elevator on the bay. These in the picture contain feed grains for livestock near the Xcel feed lot on South Washington Street.
Vintage - I printed the photograph within a year of the original exposure.
Archival Pigment - Printed in my studio using computer technology with pigmented inks on acid and lignin free paper.
Silver - Printed in my darkroom on gelatin silver paper. These prints are double weight on a cotton fiber base.
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