CNN iReport

Let me tell you about my Cold War experience with a story about my most passionate obsession.

I turned 16 in 1971 and started my junior year of high school with a brand new obsession; one that turned out to be my life’s passion.  It began with learning how to develop film & print photos.  It was all truly magical.  I knew I never wanted it to end.  So I had to do something.

I immediately started a loose leaf notebook of hand-copied instructions on how to concoct all the chemicals necessary to develop film & print photos.  My reasoning was simple and based on what seemed like reasonable assumptions.  Between Nixon’s dirty tricks and the CIA messing around in global politics, I estimated the likelihood of a nuclear exchange in my lifetime as between 5 and 25 percent for an annihilation resulting in a post-nuclear holocaust for the survivors.

I fully expected to be one of those survivors.  I’d been schooled on how to survive, literally, back in elementary school.  So sometime in the next 75 years or so, there was a significant chance of me running from radioactive clouds remaining after the very brief WW-III.  When it happened, (not so much if, but when) I wanted to record what it looked like, how people had changed.  So I started adding more hand-copied instructions on how to make film and photo paper.  With an emphasis on older, simpler processes, like the chemistry of Civil War photographs.

I hand-copied over 80 pages of instructions.  But I gave it up when I was in the Air Force and stationed in the middle of a field of 160 nuclear ICBM’s.  But the notebook is packed away with my old enlarger, somewhere in storage.  You know, just in case . . .