The Superior Express -

I was a grade school student when /Aunt Viola gave me a point and shoot camera. After receiving the box camera with a flash attachment, I started sharing family photography assignments with my father. Until then, my father was the family photographer. He used a box camera he won about 20 years earlier by guessing the number of jelly beans in a Fisher Drug Store jar. His camera took good photos provided the subjects were outside on a bright, sunny day. As these entries are made in the notebook, it is partially overcast outside. Dad's camera wouldn't produce a usable picture today.

After finding several dozen negatives his camera produced in the 1930s and 40s, I started sharing the better ones on my personal Facebook page I maintain for family messages. At first I planned to only post family photos I thought my cousins and their children would enjoy. For example, one was taken of the Royal Gorge bridge in 1938. That fall Dad and a classmate drove Don Mullet to California for an extended period of physical therapy. The picture shows the bridge, the graveled road that led up to it and John Mullet's car with Don most likely sitting in the front passenger seat. While in California, my father enrolled in a vocational school and studied diesel mechanics. He worked part-time for a farmer delivering farm products to the Brown Derby and other famous Hollywood establishments. Another picture was of one of my father's cousins standing by an airplane. When that picture was taken, she was employed as an airline stewardess and I assume the airplane was one she worked on.

The family thought she had a glamorous life. Later her husband was employed as a pilot for a Middle-Eastern airline. I believe he was based in Iran before the Shah was overthrown.

Friends seemed to enjoy the old photos. With their encouragement, I started on what has become a fascinating hobby of finding and sharing photos from the past on my Facebook page. This week I shared a photo taken in 1977 of more than 20 boxes of appliances unloaded earlier that day and still sitting on the sidewalk in front of the Carpenter Appliance store. Three members of the Carpenter family are also pictured. The first 18 hours the picture was posted, it gathered more than 60 likes, was shared four times and generated nine comments.

As one person commented, in those days appliances were made in the United States and readily available. Today most are imported and hard to come by.

Four years ago I shared a photo of two high school girls riding horses on a country road. It is published with this notebook entry. I remembered taking the picture but I didn't remember the girls' names or when it was taken. I asked for help in identifying the photo.

The picture generated a lot of suggestions as to who the girls might be but no positive identification.

Recently, Facebook suggested I share it again and I did. Once again, it got lots of suggestions.

When several people suggested one of the riders was Melanie Mikkelsen, her sister, Tanya Lynch, said, "I thought so when the picture first came out. I'd have bet money it was Mel riding Dan. We had Dan and he looked like that horse and a horse named Waldo looked like the other horse. The rider's shirt looked like what Mel wore. Same facial expression too.

But it wasn't her sister. It was somebody else.

Gwen Porter wrote, "First glance looks like me but obviously not."

And then bingo! A positive identification. Both riders identified themselves and said they often rodeon the pictured road which is in the hills south of Superior.

The picture is of Roxy Snyder Williams and Rhonda Utecht Mallam. Roxy lived in Superior for about four years when her parents, Gene and Jody Snyder, owned the Hereford Inn. The family home at Second and Kansas or as Rhonda said, "South of Clyde's and west of Fenimore's. The family included three daughters, Robyn, Randy and Roxy, and a son named Rusty.

Rhonda, I remember. She was part of a longtime Superior family and lived further east. She married a Superior resident.

There were a number of Superior families with horses in those days.

I remember a customer at the gasoline station telling me about spending the previous night in a Superior hotel. He must have been sleeping with his window open for about midnight he was awakened by several girls galloping horses up main street. When talking about his stop in Superior he said, "Superior certainly is not a one-horse town." And then he told me about being awakened by the sound of galloping horses.

We don't have nearly as many horses in town now as we did then but we do have a town on the move. This issue has a story and advertisement about the opening of a small clothing boutique. And at least two more little shops will be opening in the near future, our empty houses are being occupied and now ones are being constructed.

A couple weeks ago I received a telephone call for the owner of a business in another town. He commented on the favorable appearance of Superior.

We must not give up on our little towns. There are signs that new life is sprouting out here in the country.