Boys of Summer
By Stefene Russell
Photo courtesy of Scott K. Williams, Florissant, www.stlouistimeportal.com
Between roughly 1902 and 1950, ordinary folks would mail their film to Eastman Kodak to have it developed into “real photo” postcards, in lieu of snapshots. Though you never saw them for sale in drugstore carousels, real-photo postcards had their own charm and offered a peek into lives—from birth announcements to memento mori to portraits of particularly handsome cows or pigs—that would otherwise be forgotten. Sometimes, too, the shutter of someone’s humble box camera snapped open to catch an important but fleeting moment in history. Decades before the bloody race riot of 1949 (which was sparked on the first day of integration at the Fairground Park swimming pool), these kids splashed around together in a shallow city wading pool, segregation be damned.
