Woonsocket, Rhode Island
This was my mother’s home town. I was born there, but I grew up in California. Her family, which included a mom and pop, 4 girls and two boys, traveled by railroad from their original home in Quebec Province to this Franco-American mecca of the 1920’s. Like Kerouac’s Lowell, Massachusetts, Woonsocket was a mill town that offered immigrants a place to work and grow families. Throughout the thirties and forties, my mother grew up in this Bedford Falls-Peyton Place-like town and eventually got married to my father from Providence. In the fifties, they moved to California and I showed up. They returned east for my birth, her brother’s funeral, and several of my summer vacations.
My favorite trip was the summer of 1979. I’d just graduated college and I went there with my mother and fiancée. I was an adult and was treated so with all the affection and bounty a long lost cousin could ever receive. I hope to post some of those pictures in the future, but for now I’ll post the pictures I took the summer of 1985. I took the trip with my parents. My father had suffered his first stroke a year previously. Working hard in Hollywood, I had just been ill for a month or so with severe headaches and had just finished a prescribed round of medication that also left me constipated. I won’t bore or disgust you with the further details, but I was terribly distracted by my illness and did not take full advantage of the opportunity to once again enjoy their affections and share my bounty with them. I remember taking a lot of naps.
However, I did get these pictures. The photos have a strong blue tint. These scans were taken from old prints that have obviously degraded over the years. The reds and greens are softer; the blues remain to dominate. I will begin posting this series from the summer of 1985.
Woonsocket, Rhode Island - wiki
Blackstone River - wiki
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