Year Two

I felt the best photographs were done in the eighteen hundreds, when they used maybe the silver gelatin dry plate process. The point was they used large negatives and I wanted to make a camera using large glass plates but still fairly portable. But all this was beyond my skill level. I had noticed the difference in the TV film quality of the nineteen fifties, which on the old RCA black and white TV we had for ten years was exceptional as compared to the reruns for instance of Route 66 or Naked City. Later found out that the originals were done as silver on film and then copied to videotape.

The Vietnam war was raging. Protest was everywhere. Ford was intellectually radical but was not of a mind to be all that participatory and neither was I. He had the San Francisco Chronicle delivered every morning, and while it was a Republican owned pro-war paper, it was huge - jam packed with news items and stories of every description, and did carry sometimes good factual reporting on the war. I read mainly the news sections, but there was art, theater, TV, radio, music, gardening, reviews, sports, society, personals, letters to the editor and endless ink on paper. I remember thinking how could anybody read a whole weekday paper let alone a Sunday Edition. Have to spend all day. And it had a lot of good columnists. We generally would start the day reading the paper, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and maybe weed. Ford as I remember had places to go and people to see, what with classes mostly and so he tended to stay straight.

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