Contact sheet #43 has images from six different times.  Each contact sheet contains negatives in strips of six or fewer.  Usually each contact sheet contained negatives from one continuous roll of film.  Some, like this, have strips of negatives from different rolls of film.

There is a set of photographs I took in Denmark in the summer of 1973.  One of the first things I did as a summer exchange student was to join my extended host family at a vacation cottage in north Sjaelland.  My host family father was a major general in the Danish army.  One of the benefits of that position was that he got to use a private cabin set in a landscaped park with a pond.  These are the photographs with file names having “b” in them.  Among the photographs is a toddler, Cille, playing with the pump and water.  She would be in her 50s now. 

The set of photos with an “a” in the filename were shot in the fall of 1975.  Craig Murrin was driving my TR4.  He had a TR4 in high school and was enjoying the ride.  In comparison with today’s cars, the TR4 is heavy, clumsy and slow.  It was powered by a pushrod four cylinder engine generating no more than 100 horsepower.  It weighed a little over a ton.  The cheapest of today’s cars could outperform it.  But they aren’t as much fun.

The photos with a “c” in the filename were in the dorm, Altoona, hanging out with friends who lived elsewhere.  In 43c39 someone shot a photo of me describing how to use the caffeine that Chris Dewey had obtained.  He had a 500 gram bottle of pharmaceutical grade caffeine.  Long before Red Bull, Chris filled corked test tubes with a mixture of caffeine, sugar, and antacids.  This was so much safer than his making methamphetamine in the lab.  I preferred to get a pea-sized clump at the end of my room key and dump it at the back of my throat, washed down with water.  In the photo I demonstrate.

43f32 is a photo of my grandparents Pat and Crystal’s farmstead, looking south towards the house, from late summer of 1977 or so.  By this time my grandparents were in their late 70s and not farming much.  Granddad had gotten rid of his cows by this time, at Grandma’s urging.  The next spring he got a few calves because he needed something to do.  Over the years, this view changed a little.  The tornado blew down the ribstone silo on the Studebaker pickup.  Granddad replaced the windshield and drove it another few years.  Granddad built the machine shed to the right when I was a preschooler.  He did it without any drawn plans.  After this photo, he built on to the garage, adding a space large enough to park a 1980 Chrysler.  Uncle Wes, the architect, demanded that they put together some plans on paper before Granddad poured concrete.

There are photographs of Cornell College’s Delt fraternity – proud of their paint job of the rock.  It was a pledge requirement to keep the boulder painted in the fraternity’s colors, and there were battles among the groups to keep their tag on.  Later some friends from Altoona went over in the dead of night, dug a big hole next to the rock, and buried it.  They tried to start the rumor that it was now at the bottom of Ink Pond, but the bare soil next to where the rock used to sit was a give-away.  I didn’t join my friends that night as I preferred the company of my fiancé.

At the end of the semester, Chris Dewey burned his physics textbook.  He had a stressful class with Dr. Cecil Dam and was happy to have it over.  Burning the book was cathartic for others in the class, but outraged Diana Powell when she saw us in the hallway.  It was probably stupid to have such an open flame in such a flammable old building.

The last few photographs are of homecoming weekend and its football game.  None of the photos of the game are here, but there are a few of the sidelines.