Found Saturday – Serendipitous Veteran’s Day Edition

Yesterday – Veteran’s Day – Travis and I were in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and we wandered into an antique shop. There, we found 4 boxes of old black and white 35mm and 4×5 negatives, and of course, I bought them all without even glancing through them to see what the subject matter was.

I didn’t start going through them until this morning. At first, the pictures seemed kind of mundane – the 35mm looked like it was mainly family shots, pictures of babies, that type of thing. However, there was one little strip that had some photos of what looked to be Mont St. Michel. Sure enough, the edge of the film said “Kodak France.”

So, I started flipping through the large format negatives only to discover that the majority, if not all of them, look like they were shot in immediate post-war France, particularly during what looks to be the Liberation of Paris, which would date the photos to late August 1944.

Surprise! Happy Veteran’s Day!

I’ve only scanned in a handful of these pictures, and have really only looked through one box of four of the negatives, but there’s a *lot* of interesting pictures.

I was trying to track down the history of this aircraft:

Of course, I know nothing about planes, and the only “Duration Plus” I’ve managed to find a mention of on the Google says that it was a B-17 bomber, and that it crashed in Germany on September 13, 1944. I have no idea if that is the same plane as this one, but if it was, how strange that it was on display in Paris under the Eifel Tower for the liberation celebrations, and then was destroyed in Germany about 2 weeks later?

(And of course, due to the amazing power of Teh Internetz, in the time it took to type out that paragraph, I got confirmation that the plane is indeed a B-17! Thanks, iPlaid!)

I uploaded a bunch of these pictures – they’re on my Flickr if you want to see more of them.