David Owen is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a contributing editor of Golf Digest and Popular Mechanics. His most recent book is Volume Control: Hearing in a Deafening World.
Thirty-five years ago, my father gave me a box that had sat in his attic for 20 years, and I put it in my own attic and mostly forgot about it. I knew what it contained: slides taken by my father's father, who died in 1967.I even vaguely remembered the slides because my grandfather used to put on shows for my sister and me. But his ancient projector and his screen were long gone, and so was his battery-powered handheld viewer. I had no way of looking at the slides other than holding them up to a light, so I didn't open the box.
Not long ago, I bought a scanner that can digitize images from transparencies, and when I finished doing what I'd bought it for, I remembered the slides. There were maybe 800 of them, some in rusting metal magazines and some in an old shoebox on which I (at the age of seven or eight) had written my grandfather's name several times in pencil and my little sister, Anne, had written her own name in green crayon. Most of the slides turned out to be pictures that my grandfather took during trips with my grandmother between the early 1940s and the early 1960s. I ignored those at first because I was interested mainly in pictures of myself, but eventually I got around to digitizing everything. When I did, I was amazed. Although my grandfather was self-taught and his camera wasn't much more than a Brownie, he definitely had an eye.
My grandfather was born in 1883 on a farm in Princeton, Missouri, almost all the way up by the Iowa border. The most famous thing about Princeton is that the frontier scout, sharpshooter, and trick rider Martha “Calamity” Jane Cannary was born there, or near there, in 1852. Each September, the town holds a celebration called Calamity Jane Days, and the festivities have sometimes included a parade hosted by the hog production division of Smithfield Foods. In her autobiography, , Jane mentions Princeton in the second sentence and never again. I visited for the first time a couple of years ago. I looked up old property maps
