The camera had belonged to my father's parents. When at 13 or 14 I expressed an interest in photography, my dad dug it out and gave it to me. I had only the faintest idea of how to use it, of course. We went on a family vacation to a cabin on a lake in Canada, and I shot one roll there, and another over the following winter. The film must have been sent to the drugstore for processing. This would have been in about 1969...
The strange part is that I recently (like last week) made some prints from the few surviving negatives. It's part of a small project to reprint family pictures for the next generations. Both my parents have passed, and so the pictures interest me more now; I'm making 4x6 images on 5x7 paper for all of their descendants.
The film must have been Verichrome Pan (there are no markings). The pictures are poorly composed and focused, exposures are, ummm, variable... yet I've been able to make prints from three negatives that are worth having; maybe one more to come. (The other strange part is that those negatives have survived.)
A year or two later after that, my interest in photography revived, and I began to really learn; that has led to a full career in the trade/craft/art. But that's another story.
