The guy in the middle is my grandfather. The picture was taken sometime in the mid-1950s, I found it in an old envelope postmarked 1957. I think it was taken somewhere around where Gas Works park is now on Lake Union in Seattle. My grandfather was the superintendent of the gas works plant back when it was operational and used to manufacture gas before natural gas was used. The gas was made out of some kind of slurry of coal, oil and god knows what else, hence the years and years it took to do an environmental clean up of the gas works before it could be turned into a park.
My grandfather would have been in his mid to late 50s when this picture was taken. I was an infant around this time, and as a child I remember that my grandfather seemed impossibly old (and wise). It's interesting in a circle-of-life kind of way that I am now only a few years younger than he was when this picture would have been taken. He was a near mythic person to me: someone who'd been on every continent and had been a soldier in WWI, a bounty hunter, a farmer and an engineer. He's probably the reason I've traveled as much as I have, or maybe more accurately, maybe the fear that I would never measure up to him is the reason I've traveled as much as I have.
