Your Today in Pictures...

[Simon Wyss]

A few lenses I have just finished to service for a client

[Steve Klare]

I bet it put up quite a fight!

The typical catch out of this port is fluke or flounder: weird looking fish that in their youth have one eye travel around their head so that as adults they have two eyes one one side and none on the other so they can lay on the bottom and stare up at the World.

I went for flounder with my Dad many times when I was growing up: you stand there with this pole maybe 4 feet long and bounce your hooks off the bottom. If you're lucky you can haul one of these deformed little fish up flapping for all they are worth and have it for dinner.

-good eatin' too, but nothing to get up at 4:30 for!

Not that this can't be exciting! Years (...well, decades) ago, Dad went out on a party boat for fluke. -maybe 50 guys, maybe 250 beers. All of a sudden there was an uproar back towards the stern: somebody caught a decent sized sand shark and hauled it up over the rail. Now this terrified mass of muscle and teeth is chasing a boatload of weekend fishermen around the deck! The whole boat is running around like some high speed conga-line!

-finally one of the mates pinned it down to the deck, cut the line and heaved it over the side.

Buy a man a fish, you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish, you just may give him some stories to tell!

[Graham Ritchie]

Brilliant Steve... hope they like fish

[Steve Klare]

By the Sea!

Maybe twice per year, we go down to a local fishing boat basin. We're too lazy (and unmotivated) to actually board a party-boat at 6AM and go fishing: instead we walk the docks and get some sea-air, maybe stop in and get some hot dogs and clam chowder.

Someone else was a lot more high-seas oriented than we are. While we were there a small boat docked and created quite a stir!
.

They said it's a thresher shark and they are good eatin'!

(Hope so: they now have 187 Lbs. [85kg.] of it!)

[Steve Klare]

For the couple on the church steps, today is June 16th, 1951: their wedding day. For you and I, today is June 16th, 2021, and the picture is 70 years old.

He is Herbert Herman George Klare. His family was newly American when he was born so they named him after the President. The rest is his father, his godfather and the Family name. He’s kind of special: he’s the first child of his family born outside Germany since before 1685. That didn’t prevent him from learning English starting the second day of Kindergarten (-oops!). He’s working on getting his Journeyman card as a printer (If only the guy in front of him would stop failing his exams!). Because he grew up bilingual, he has awesome language skills. He is absolutely terrifying at Scrabble: he knows words not used since the Middle Ages that somehow are still in the dictionary and somehow have both a “Z” and a “Q” in the perfect places!

She is Doris Irene Mann (and newly) Klare. She’s not even 20 years old and barely graduated from high school. She’s very bright, and in a few years will be kind of a stone-age computer programmer (IBM key-punch) and work at Universal Studios in Manhattan in the Castle Films division. She has a wicked sense of humor and adventure. She will goad Herb into going places and doing things his Eltern had no idea even existed!

They are imponderably young! When I was their age the idea of getting married was something for years from now, but growing up back then wasn’t nearly as complicated and didn’t take as long as these days!

They will be a great couple: they will take great delight in the ordinary things many people take for granted: marriage, parenthood, work, home, friends, faith. Without any concern for growing rich or powerful or famous, they will be very happy with what they have and who they are. They will make and leave many great memories.

In eleven years they will become my Mom and Dad. Growing up with them was a great privilege: they always encouraged me to seek the best things in myself. Since neither of them went to college, they were both generous and even forgiving putting my sister and me through college (-and the forgiveness was mostly for ME!). I found I never went wrong when I tried to make them proud.

Happy 70th Anniversary Mom and Dad! May it be that today you are as young and happy as you were in that picture and will stay that way forever!