This is the story, told in scattered photographs, of my family and my friends and my world as I knew and remembered it from the earliest times (around the turn of the twentieth century) to the middle 1970's. These are images and recollections from another world - a place left behind and only distantly remembered. They are pictures that I have found in old shoe boxes, stuffed in manila folders, and falling out of battered photo albums. The commentary, however incomplete, reflects stories passed down through the family or my memory of these times, often seen in fleeting recollections. But my family was not much for recording its history, and the tales and stories and fables that shaped our lives are few. And when I was younger, I was concerned only with my own microcosm -- I never stopped to think that my parents, my aunts, and my uncles might have a rich history of their own. So I am embarking on this adventure late in life in hopes that I might save from certain oblivion some tales of my own life and connect them, when I can, to what came before. NOTE: There is no Next button at the bottom of the page you will need to scroll back to the top to move to the next page.

I like to doodle when I am in meetings or between writing sessions. Over the years I have collected a stack of my sketches; they form a community of visual ideas and graphical metaphors whose meaning I am only now starting to understand. In this lexicon, then, are many of my images, drawn using pencil and fountain pen on such random media as crumpled typewriter paper, the back of cafe place mats, and the reverse side of engineering paper. As fits of insight strike me, I will return and complete the grammar of each drawing, elucidating its syntax, refining its semiotic principles, and telling its story -- fables drawn from a world now long forgotten.