This is just the latest set I've found. My parents also had each of us photographed when we were one year old. They also were delivered as a Tube O' Photos.
You may not know if your family ever purchased a Tube O' Photos, if your family happened to show foresight. If the photos had been cut apart and put into frames or into a photo album, they would not have become set in their curl over the course of years.
Were you to reach into the photo and lift up that cup of milk, that strip would snap back into its tube shape fast enough to startle you.
The tube was taken in the early sixties. So those unseparated pictures have been rolled up like that for fifty years.
These are my Uncle B's step children. I don't remember their names. I only met them once or twice. I'd have been about eight and it was, as mentioned, about fifty years ago. The marriage didn't last very long and while Uncle B was in it, they lived in San Jose, which was Somewhere Far Away to my eight year old mind.
I used to think that my parents had handled the Tube O' Photos years wisely. They had taken each of us to be memorialized for posterity when we were one year old. I knew that they had received a Tube O' Baby Faces for each of us.
But I had seen a few of the photos in frames, on the wall. And I had been shown other photos, cut apart (as below) and laid flat in the cedar chest (a place of deep storage).
So, although they talked about the tube, I thought that they had done what was necessary to forestall the effects. But, no.
Later I was to find that they had cut a few pictures loose, but had left the rest to fossilize in their tubitude. True, Mom had gone back at one point, and cut one tube into three-picture sets, then laid that out in the cedar chest with things weighing them down.
But the rest had been left to curl. I wonder how widespread this is. True, my parents and my uncle are only two instances, and they're related instances at that. But I've inherited other tubes.
I also wonder why photographers in the sixties would deliver photos in a tube like that? Was it a recent change in technology, so that it looked new and modern? Was it supposed to be cool, seeing all those faces in a line? Were these the proof copies, with the tubeness implying that you'd get a nice flat picture if you paid the full price?
I don't know. I only know that I've cut apart those photos. And I'm flattening them out. And I don't even know if I'll be throwing them out when I'm done. Because I may never know these people's names and after fifty years there really isn't much of a connection.
