Transcription
THE MOTHER’S OATS BABY GIVES A SLIDE SHOW – Chapter II
3-23-77.
Dear Family,-
Last Friday, the day after the “climax,” I said I was writing my F.L. while the excitement of it all was still with me, but I got to the bottom of the page with much more to tell, so closed abruptly with “More tomorrow.” That was five days ago - five busy days - too busy for any spare time to work at the job of putting my equipment away and getting my slides back into their proper places in six different trip files, so that long job is still hanging over me. Now to pick up where I abruptly left off last Friday:
Long before each of you reaches your official retirement, the better your retirement life will be if you have had a long-standing main hobby and several minor hobbies. My main hobby all my adult life has been photography, starting with my becoming Editor-in-Chief of The Princeton Pictorial Review and continuing on with that very professional dark-room I had under the library at Stan Hywet. Now to show you how “all-absorbing” a hobby can be:
Way last summer Harriet Doyle Parke asked me if I would put on a slide show for the Stan Hywet Travelogue Program, suggesting Germany and particularly the Rhine as my subject. As I have about a dozen shows on Germany I thought I would be using one of them, but when the publicity on my show billed it as a trip “Down the Rhine” I knew I had to put together a special show. I had travelled along both sides of the Rhine and in the areas back from Rhine on six different Family Trips, so I got out my Trip Letters on these six trips and had many fond memories recalled as I re-read the semi-weekly reports to you-all back home. Next I got out the charts I always made up for each of my shows, telling the chronological story as we travelled and showing in which of my five projectors each slide was to be used. After each of our trips I usually gave two family dinners, one to show the first half of our trip and the other the second half, each show filed in a separate box. Thus I had to bring down stairs [sic] twelve file-boxes for the six trips, and when I had finished picking out the slides in each box that might be used for my Rhine show, I had the equivalent of about a two-hour show. On the first elimination run I got it down to about a 1½ hr. show, then a second dry run got it down to about a 1¼ hr. show, and then I fussed with different changes in my story until I was pretty sure I could finish up in one hour. Then I got out my guide books and pamphlets and even four different volumes of my big Encyclopedia Britannica, and spent several days on “home work” for the six trips, all of which were very interesting as I was taking the trips all over again and bringing back experiences I had forgotten. Bill & Jeanne, you’ll be interested to know that a book you gave me years ago for a birthday present, “CASTLES OF GERMANY” A Stars and Stripes Publication, was better than my guide books when I needed info on certain castles. Of my five guide books on Germany, I was surprised to find that the old fashioned [sic] type Baedecker was the least helpful, my particular edition on the Rhine having been published back in 1900. Back in those days Baedecker was the “bible” for the traveller [sic], but now modern guide books are more stimulating – more inspirational.
Why did I have to do so much “home work” on this show? In the past my travelogue shows have told a day-by-day story of our experiences as we travelled. My narration was spontaneous as I was simply telling a true story. This show, put together from six different trips, was “fiction” - an “invented” story. A 1967 slide might introduce a 1954 slide as though the two had been taken at the same time. I mixed up slides taken on different trips to tell a story as though they had all been taken on the same day on one trip. I found it quite a challenge to “invent” this special trip and give it the interest of an actual “true” trip. It was fun creating something new – something I had never done before in my travelogue shows, which enables me to close with a punch line about HOBBIES: “Your hobby is what you make it.” You can go to extremes – create wonderful dreams – if you are truly enthusiastic about your hobby. And what would be “work” for others is “play” for you.
One main hobby and many outside interests will make your life of retirement abundantly full and rewarding.
Your “hobby happy”
WTranscriber
Cindi RokeLanguage
English