Seven Decades

This book, Seven, tells of my recollections of places where I lived or which I visited in the past seven decades. Why seven decades? The answer is that it has been seven decades - seventy years - since I first began to see the world through the lens of a camera. In the summer of 1954, I used an Agfa Single-Lens Reflex (SLR) camera to record my work on a cattle ranch in Montana. Those 35mm Kodachrome slides were preserved and they are the starting point for Part II of Seven. I used the same borrowed camera to record my experiences as a mountain climber in Canada in the summer of 1955. Seven begins with Part I, in which I recall places that I visited, or where I lived and worked, from my birth in Iowa in 1932 to 1954, when I was a student at Harvard Medical School. Part I also tells of my years as a student at Yale and of my two summers at Quantico with the U.S. Marine Corps. I purchased and used other cameras in the seven decades that are recorded in Part II. I took pictures using color and black and white film, and in recent years I found it convenient to record digital images. In the seven decades from 1954 to 2024, I traveled throughout the world, and I lived and worked in Massachusetts, Colorado, Missouri, West Virginia, New Jersey, and Maryland. Seven includes descriptions of places in twelve eastern states from Maine to Virginia, using words to describe what I saw instead of reproductions of my photographs.This is the latest book from a three-time winner of a Finalist’s Medal from Indie Book Awards.