Old photographs

When I filmed for the “It Gets Better” project, the organizers suggested that I get together some photographs of myself as a kid, to go along with the stories I told about my childhood and adolescence. This has turned out to be a harder task than I’d expected.

I quickly found photos of me as a small child, and then some from age 15 on (most not very good), but I haven’t yet unearthed the stuff in between. There are boxes of stuff to go through.

But a sort of progress report …

First, my delighted parents with a newborn me, a photo I didn’t see until after my parents (and stepmother) had died, an impossibly sweet photo:

Everybody wore hats then.

Then (much later, 1957) the smiling young musician among his peers in Reading PA:

And (in 1962) my Princeton yearbook photo, showing the sensitive but serious young man:

Finally, an unexpected find (from the Ohio State faculty-staff newsletter in 1977), the totally 1970s me (oh, the hair!), about as hot as I ever got:

Sort of funny-looking, but (as my daughter says, in my defense) sweet and fuzzy.

5 Responses to “Old photographs”

  1. Father Jape Says:

    Wow…. If someone’d asked me if that was Arnold Zwicky or Dennis Hopper, I would’ve never opted for the former.

    • arnold zwicky Says:

      Gasp, the Dennis Hopper of Easy Rider. I see that with my current haircut and facial hair (visible here), I now vaguely resemble Hopper late in his life — but I look sweeter and he looks leaner and tougher. It never would have occurred to me.

  2. Chris Ambidge Says:

    um – which of the 1957 faces are you? the type is impossibly small

    – – curious in toronto

    • arnold zwicky Says:

      The one at the bottom, with the crewcut. (I suspect that Ricky Nelson, just four months older than me, played a role in my highschool haircut; I had a thing for him. Then I went to Princeton, where a crewcut would have been notably unpreppy, so I changed styles — and entered my period of chinos, loafers, blue oxford-cloth shirts, and tweed jackets.

  3. Eleanor Houck Says:

    Great photos!

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