Wednesday, April 7, 2010

(Not So) Wordless Wednesday - Post 98: A Picnic at La Jolla

I'm posting family photographs from my collection on Wednesdays, but they won't be wordless Wednesday posts like others do - I simply am incapable of having a wordless post.

I managed to scan about 100 family photographs in the Scanfest in January, and have converted the scanned TIF files to smaller JPGs, cropped and rotated as best I can. Many of these were "new" to my digital photograph collection.

Here is a photograph from the Carringer family collection handed down by my mother in the 1988 to 2002 time period:


My grandfather, Lyle L. Carringer, described the date, setting and subjects of this photograph in his beautiful handwriting on the back of this photograph:

"Picnic at La Jolla, May 9, 1915.

"Left to right -- Bess Perret, L. Carringer, Sally Saunders, Mr. Anderson, Vera Easton, Van Stewart, Jessie Weaver, and Doris Thompson."

This photograph was probably taken at either La Jolla Cove (you get down to the rocks through a store and a long rickety staircase) or at the wave-carved cliffs south of the Children's Pool at La Jolla. These are still popular photo areas for San Diego area people.

Whenever I see a photograph like this with my grandfather's friends identified, I always wonder if he kept in contact with them over the course of his life. Lyle was 23, and just out of high school (he went to school very late) when this picture was made, and these may be his high school friends, or they may be some of his colleagues from Marston's Department Store, where he worked as an accountant. A review of the San Diego High School yearbooks and the San Diego City directories for this period might shed some light on the relationships.

UPDATED: The editor of the La Jolla Light newspaper contacted me requesting to publish this photograph in the newspaper, and I agreed. The editor passed the photograph to La Jolla historians in an effort to identify the site of this photograph, and the comment back was:

"The photo seems to have been taken by the Devil’s Slide. (You can see the stairs in the background.) Carol informs me that the Devil’s Slide was located by Goldfish Point along what is today the Coast Walk trail."


The next time I visit La Jolla Cove, I will try to visit this site.

4 comments:

Sanjay Maharaj said...

They all look dashing with nice outfits

TCasteel said...

Great Picture - We used to go to La Jolla for family picnics also! Of course this was in the 60's and we were not so fashionably dressed.

Anonymous said...

I'm the editor of the LJ Light. We'd love to publish your photo. Contact me at editor@lajollalight.com

Kerry Scott said...

Wow, I remember that area too, from when we first moved to San Diego when I was a kid (late 70s). We weren't so fashionably dressed either!

Great photo!