The Way We Were.

A friend posted on a forum some classic photos taken from 1939-1943 in color! Photos in color were rare back then, and these photos are so vivid and gritty ... I really can't put into words the emotions some of them evoke. This one, in particular, really struck me. It looks like it could have been set and taken today.

Women workers employed as wipers in the roundhouse having lunch in their rest room, Chicago and NW Railway Company. Clinton, Iowa. April 1943. Photo by Jack Delano. (Library of Congress)

You think about people looking different in a different era, their faces expressing the time, the place, their life then. I often look at the Jews around me, and -- morbidly -- I attempt to picture them in 1940s garb, what they'd look like in a kitchen in Germany or Austria or France circa 1938, and into the 1940s. Is that weird? Like I said, it's probably morbid. I have such an affinity for the past, my memories of moments thousands of years old vivid (that's another blog post, standing at Sinai, the imagery clear as my childhood in my mind), so these photos really sing to my spirit.

Woman working on a "Vengeance" dive bomber. Tennessee. February 1943. Photo by Alfred T. Palmer.
(Library of Congress)

You can view the rest of these photos by clicking here. Check out No. 30! (Shout out to Lincoln, Nebraska, there!)