This Chicago Uptown family lived in an apartment on Winthrop. My notes for this day are sketchy. I’m uncertain whether some of these kids were foster children or neighbors. The mother asked me to take a picture of the group. I shot an entire role of film trying to get a decent shot of the group. It was a miserable failure. The kids didn’t want to be photographed. When I was scanning negs, though, and saw this shot, I broke out into a belly laugh. The boy in the background is struggling to retain a dog which was jumping on the kid in the foreground, causing him to drop a second dog. He almost bit off his tongue struggling to hold the dog.
Note the 45 rpm record in the foreground. In these days, music was distributed on vinyl records. They came in two varieties. Singles came on 45 rpm records. Albums came on larger 33 rpm records. Records didn’t sound as clear as CDs, nor did they have the dynamic range. Worse, the more you played them, the more scratches and pops they developed from the needle that literally “scratched” the surface to develop an analog signal.
Also note the TV set in the background with the rabbit ear antenna. This was the era before cable or satellite. Such TVs generally picked up five stations: the three major networks plus PBS and WGN.
