Bucks Montgomery Physician Winter 2021 - 15

CREATIVE CORNER

A SHAGGY TALE
by Richard Weiss, MD

inters used to be colder in
this neck of the woods, no?
I seem to recall much more
ice and snow during my early years,
when there was a war going on far
away, and when my mother was young
and very beautiful. The cold weather
was why the following took place.
Dad had enlisted in the Navy and was
training to become a gunnery
officer on an LST. One day I learned
that he would be arriving home later that
week, on leave, from Norfolk, Virginia.
We met him at the Civil War era railroad
station which was filled with men
in uniform. He looked resplendent
in his dress blues bearing one-anda-half stripes on the sleeves.

That night I was too excited to fall asleep
and I heard Mom and Dad whispering
in the room next to mine. They were
planning an excursion for the next day,
the 23rd, their fifteenth anniversary.
Our five-year-old car had been put in
mothballs in the garage, sans battery.
Early the next morning we took a bus
downtown and went to an elegant shop
that was owned by my great-uncle,
a furrier. Then and there my father
bought for my mother a wonderful gift,
a beautiful, spotted full-length coat!
How in the world could a young
man on a sailor's salary afford
such a magnificent gift?
Simple - he had sold our car! Later,
my mother would refer to that 23rd
purchase as " The Ford is My Leopard " !

NEGATIVE TO POSITIVE
by Richard Weiss, MD

'll bet you didn't know that Snow White and The
Seven Dwarfs were good photographers!

Back in 1937 when they were born, color was coming into
its own. Publications like Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post
and the weekend Rotogravure sections in the newspapers
put photography into the forefront as an emerging
art. Pictures of workmen high above Manhattan were
everywhere. The Chrysler Building in New York was
probably the world's most famous man-made structure.
Living on the Disney lot gave them great advantages
regarding the study of photography. Each day, Snow
White, Doc, Bashful, Sleepy, Dopey, Grumpy, and Happy
were exposed to the finer points of composition, focal
length importance, film quality, and lens usage which
put them, or at least a few of them, in the Margaret
Bourke-White or Ansel Adams pictorial stratosphere.

Snow White was the most accomplished of
them. She consistently won Southern California
photographic championships and outshone
her shorter, male Disney inhabitants.
War preparations made chemicals and photographic
paper scarce. Home grown developing of film in
the Disney studios was no longer possible for noncommercial use. Film had to be sent from the West
Coast to Kodak labs in Rochester, New York, for
processing. Given all the disruptions in daily life imposed
by World War II processing often took forever.
The delays caused Snow White to take solace in the
friendship provided by her friends. In order to help
assuage her anxiety the height challenged boys decided
to write a song which the beautiful Snow White could
sing while she waited endlessly for the return mail:
It was called " Someday My Prints Will Come " !

BUCKS AND MONTGOMERY COUNTY MEDICAL SOCIETIES

Bucks Montgomery Physician Winter 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Bucks Montgomery Physician Winter 2021