Who Was Shorpy Higginbotham?

The other day, Friendatella (whose caller identity is "Blocked Caller") and I were walking around the Mission, and we stepped into The Apartment, one of the less pretentious vintage stores in the Mission. The owner has a laid back, affable manner, and we had a long discussion about the many "analog" photographs he has, most of them conveniently categorized and generally informal snapshots that seem to have come from abandoned family albums.

He had an especially interesting series of beach shots from the 1940s taken in San Diego. It was interesting to look at the faces of young men in their teens and early 20s some six plus decades ago. What stories might they have had and what was going through their heads as they stood in groups with their arms around each other with unapologetic affection one would not see even in groups of gay men today.

Such photos in the age of digital images made me glad to recently come across two great blogs I'd never seen before -- Shorpy, named after a young boy working in the mines of Alabama a century ago and Accidental Memories, which also features odd, often historic photos and random bits of intriguing art.

Both of these remind me why I decided to start blogging more than three years ago and that I would like to get more "into" it than I have in recent months. Sometimes I resent Twitter and Facebook for killing off blogs or distracting me. At least I managed to kill off my Friendster and MySpace accounts eons ago, but I hope to make more connections with blogs of this order that have intrigue equal to that of the mystery of Lora Direnzo. Too bad she never got to meet Shorpy.