Recently, I have started going through the piles of 35mm slides we have in storage.  It is quite a process (however, these have been a little easier than the machine prints).  Over three weeks I was able to process all 7,894 slides from the 1960s.  I shouldn’t say all, though, because I’m sure we will find a random box someplace with more slides in it!

I quickly found that in organizing mounted slides, there is more information available to you than just the content of the image itself. Most slides since 1960 have a date (month and year) and a frame number stamped on the mount. Most also have an indicator of film type (e.g. Kodachrome, Ektachrome, Kodachrome II), and some have a letter-number code (W9, A5, A6, A1, R2, H3 etc. — if anyone know what these codes mean, please let me know!). Plus, the date stamps and film type names were printed in various colors (usually red or black). I can use all of these clues to help reassemble sets/rolls that were broken up for one reason or another.

In the beginning phases, I changed my strategy often. (Stephen had already sorted the slides by year shortly after they arrived, making my job considerably easier). Each box usually had a few slides that did not belong with the rest, and there were often big gaps in numbering. I started listing in a spreadsheet all the missing numbers from each set, noting the film type and the color of the date stamp, but by the time I started on 1965, I decided that making note of all the missing slides was not helping me. I wouldn’t trust the notes I had written and would check for the number sequence anyway.

Stephen also had many piles of slides he had found floating around loose that needed to be matched with their rolls. This meant looking at the loose slides on a light box and using my various labels and descriptions to find a home for each one.

I am now starting on the 1970s and am changing my strategy once again, because I have twice as many boxes of slides as I did for the 60s. Hugh must have really hit his slide stride in the 1980s — those boxes are falling off the shelves! I’m sure my strategies will change a few more times before I see the end of the sea of slides.

My name is Amber, and I’m the newest student assistant at work on the Morton collection. One of the projects I’m working on is with what we call the “Machine Prints.” In the 1990s-early 2000s, Hugh Morton sent many of his rolls of film to local drug and grocery stores to be developed.  He would then look through those negatives and decide which ones he wanted to make prints of.  Unfortunately that meant that many negatives were separated from the rest of their roll, and quite often, the prints in an envelope don’t have matching negatives (or any negatives at all!).

Morton did label most of the Machine Print envelopes, but those labels don’t always match the pictures.  The first envelope I opened was of a game in the Dean Dome, but in the middle was a random picture of Prince Charles.  (Apparently it was taken at the Biltmore Estate, where he came to learn more about preserving historic structures—see Hugh Morton’s North Carolina, page 127).

Elizabeth had already done a preliminary sort with general categories such as Basketball, Grandfather Mountain, and Nature, and I then tried to narrow them a little more.  The first one I tackled was basketball and was able to sort those by date.  However, many envelopes were simply labeled “NCAA ‘94,” and it was up to me to figure out which teams were playing.

This photo stayed with me as I was going through the many others.  I was amazed at how #15 was defying gravity.  The sheer physics of what he is doing is incomprehensible to me.  This was in a roll labeled “2/98 NC State.”  However, the visitors bench sure doesn’t look red. According to Hugh Morton’s North Carolina, this is Vince Carter and they are playing Cal Berkley (p. 199), which probably would have put it during the Nov. 22, 1997 game at the Dean Dome.  At the June “Photo ID Party,” Fred Kiger said this was Morton’s favorite sports photo he ever took.

This next picture was in an envelope labeled “Groundhog Ice Cream.”  You can see the chocolate smeared on her nose.  But, what is the back story on this?  Is this from Grandfather Mountain?  Some February 2nd tradition?  If anyone knows, please fill me in.  The curiosity is killing me.

I am currently in the middle of going through all the Grandfather Mountain pictures.  What an amazing place.  The sweeping vistas are beautiful, and that Swinging Bridge—I don’t know if I am brave enough to cross it.  I just finished with the Fall pictures and the striking reds and yellows against green grass and bright blue sky are so perfectly captured, and the pictures of bears with different families and local celebrities are a crack-up.

This has definitely made me want to visit Grandfather soon, to see the places depicted in these pictures and try to capture them with my own camera (although I know they can never be nearly as stunning). Hey, mom and dad, what are we doing for Thanksgiving?  They have golf there!