Spent the weekend printing and framing a collection of black and white photos from the 1970s. Like most newspaper photograpbers of the era, I shot mostly in black and white, almost always with Kodak Tri-X Pan film (grainy as hell with an ASA rating of 400).

The grain didn’t matter, though, because reproduction in most papers was marginal at best and — in many cases — the grain added drama to the photos.

Among the photos was a shot of one young lady who — while attending the Mississippi River Festival in 1972 — decided clothes were a bother and stood up in the crowd wearing only a scarf and beads. The “family newspaper” I worked for at the time wouldn’t run the photo of course but an alternative weekly in St. Louis did and it later appeared in a couple of magazines.

That flower child from the 70s may be a grandmother now and that photo may one day fall into the hands of her children or grandchildren who may look at it and say: “Mother?”