Stephen (Steve) Dixon

Dave,

That ought to be in a book, or National Geographic, something!. Wow! Must take some incredible patience, in addition to photography skills, to get a shot like that.

Barbara Kahn (Tepper)

Exquisite Dave - you're a true artist!

David Buchholz

Thank you for the photo compliments...only about 35,000 left...

The WHHS Experience...

Bear with me.  This is not about photography.  At WHHS I was a middling student, rarely getting A’s.  My grades were mostly B’s, an occasional C, and not much more than that.  For five years (I moved to CA after my junior year) I felt intimidated by the brighter, more accomplished students, the Bruce Fettes, Dale Gieringers, Phil Speisses, and the like. 

 To make up for my insufficiencies I tried cheating.  A little.  Joe Knab caught me.   I also remember someone slipping me (this one wasn’t my fault), the drivers’s ed exam, and moments later John Counts (am I remembering his name correctly?) saw it in my hand.  The first “F” in Driver’s Ed in history.  And probably the last.

After graduation I went first to Whitman College in lovely downtown Walla Walla, Washington, then returned to Cincinnati, graduated from UC, married, returned again, received an MA from Miami, taught for eight years, then tried photography, a hobby I had only picked up in 1969, my senior year at UC.

 But this isn’t about that.  This was about always feeling both in high school and afterwards that what I had done, what I had accomplished, paled in comparison to what I had discovered that my WHHS classmates had done.  CEOs, doctors, attorneys, mountain climbers, philanthropists, artists, musicians, professors, writers, playrights, producers, mayors, councilmen, real estate moguls—(the only moguls I knew about were on the fearsome black diamond runs at Squaw …not that long ago I picked up a magazine listing the best Lasik surgeons in America (I know that one of them is a classmate, but I can’t remember which one).

I compared myself to such illustrious company and resorted to hyperbole to give myself a little street cred.  On my two paragraph autobiography on my first art photographs I managed to quote (or paraphrase) both Thoreau and Blake…Here’s one line:  “In the smaller corners of our lives there live the grain of sand that possesses infinity and the hour that speaks for all eternity.  I seek those things in our lives which may last only for a moment or are so small as to be almost invisible, but which nevertheless remind us of the eternities and infinities that lie both within and without us.”  OMG.  How presumptuous.  Recently, I was asked to provide a current version of my autobiography when I sold a cover photo for an art publication.  This is it:  “I like to take pictures.”

Maybe this is one of the perks that visit us as we close in on seventy.  If  you are at all like me, and you’ve had some issues in accepting yourself, it’s time to let go of that.  We really can accept ourselves for who we are,  for what we’ve done, feel equally comfortable with both our successes and failures, and rest just knowing that whatever it is or was, it was enough.

 

Michael Hunting

Very impressive, David. All of us have a purpose in life. Finding it is a big part of the journey.

Nancy Messer

Thanks Dave for you comments.  For many years I had those "what have I really accomplished with my life" worries when I knew so many of my peers had done so well.  It was nice seeing in writing that other people existed who had the same worries at some point in their lives.  I didn't ever stop to think that what I've done, good and bad, is acceptable and that my life has been very worthwhile.

Philip Spiess

So here is the reality and real irony of life, Dave Buchholz:  You mention me as one of the brighter, more successful students at WHHS.  I was getting about the same grades as you, as my report cards will show, and was feeling about the same way you were (Shit:  Dale Gieringer, Bill Sinkford, Dave Ransohoff, etc., were getting much better grades than I was!).  And, as I commented when I first wrote to you on your Profile, I thought you were much cooler than I was!  (I was always afraid I was the nerd in the top-buttoned shirt, the kid who never knew quite what was really going on.)  My humor, and satire, therefore, was my defense, starting in about 8th grade (or maybe earlier, at Clifton School).

Your photographs are unbelieveable -- and unique.  It shows what a talent you truly have.  Each of us, it turns out, has a unique talent that sometimes we don't even realize initially.  Many have thought that my talent was humor, or in the drama.  And, yes, I will admit that my penchant for humor exceeds my predilection for good taste.  But I myself consider that my special talent is an understanding of history, and the ability to transmit that through teaching.

So we never know, do we, until we see our true selves reflected in the eyes of others.

[P.S.:  What did you teach for eight years, and where?]

Ira Goldberg

Dave, Nancy, Mike and all of us... We get so many expectations from others when we are young, then compare ourselves to yet others as we grow up. But, the test of our maturity - and it often comes with age or therapy - is the ability to decide for ourselves what our gifts are, what gives us gratifying lives as well as supports our families and communities. And, then to appreciate it well! Anything else becomes "unproductive thinking," as my dear and wise bride would say. We may wish we did this or that, overlooking the work of our hands and hearts and it's value that we bequeath to others. 

Ann Shepard (Rueve)

Oh, that we could have such perspective in our youth. 

Bonnie Altman (Templeton)

Dave, the photograph of the red admiral butterfly is excellent.  Not only was the light right but so was the lens and the eye that saw and memorialized the butterfly.  All of us were keenly aware of the talents of our classmates and thought of ourselves as "average".  It is only after a lifetime that we can appreciate our own unique talents.

Bonnie

Stephen (Steve) Dixon

My first reading for a Children's Storytime at Barnes & Noble. Not my book, you understand. This wasn't an author-signing event. I'm just reading to the kids, something I have been doing, outside the bookstore setting, for almost fifty years.

The little girl in the chair is Lucy Love Kirkland, adopted a little over a year ago from China. She is sitting close because she has new cochlear implants and is still gearing up to full-sound mode. Her mom, a friend, took the picture.

The book is My Teacher Is A MONSTER!  An excellent book.

Philip Spiess

Cute picture, Steve!  But as a former teacher, the title of the book scares me!  [Actually, my former boss, director of the Middle School at Browne Academy (see picture on my Profile), had a plaque on his desk:  "You can't scare me!  I teach!"]

Barbara Kahn (Tepper)

Steve, This is a feel good picture for sure!  Thank you for posting!

John Danner

Dave, et al  awesome photographs.

if you were middling, i was poor to middling. So much so the school wanted me tested to see why a kid with a 148 alledged IQ was having so much trouble. ADD was not invented yet. My grades were mainly Cs with a some Bs and one A i think.but give me a standardized test and i was lights outs. my graduate school i finally figured it out. i had great compassion for my students since many were like me, identified as gifted but having know idea howto play th school game. i think many boys are like that.we do all find a place where we can excell and that is really the important thing. love your pictures Dave.you hav a true gift. thanks for sharing. oh yeah the puns were awesome.

Ann Shepard (Rueve)

It wasn't just boys John. That's why I didn't share my report card from my senior year after detailing all the classes and teachers I had from seventh through twelfth grades in my earlier post #459. "Fair to middlin'" is an accurate description.

Philip Spiess

John:  Our Boy Scout troop's Scoutmaster of many years dealing with boys (his and mine included) insists that, starting about the age of 12 or 13, anything you tell a boy goes right in one ear and out the other, so you have to tell him whatever it is multiple times until it sticks; this continues until the boy is about 22 or 25.  From my own perspective of eight years teaching Middle School, I'd say this is basically true.  And boys are much more physically active; they don't want to sit in the classroom and hear lectures and take notes.  So you have to get at them a different way.  I take it you did; I like to think that I did, too. 

Paul Simons

This is in response to the many fine photos here by Dave and others. Sunset, Wildwood Crest NJ

John Danner

Phil, I am sure did as well. Those 6, 7, and 8th grade were difficult but do rewarding. When the light bulb went off it was a thrill to see how excited where were. Plus they loved the jokes I told. I am still getting emails from them.

Philip Spiess

John:  I taught 5th and 6th Grade History/Geography for eight years before I retired last year.  You can guess that, yes, I told them jokes.  But, as you say, it was that lightbulb going off that made it all worthwhile.  And History (really the story of violence and sex through time) especially appealed to the boys.  When Troy was destroyed as we read The Iliad in a junior prose form, I overturned the desks of my students; whenever I was making a point about the Roman attitudes displayed in the Romans' founding legends (ex., Mars and a she-wolf, La Lupa, as parents of Romulus and Remus, indicative of a war-like founding), all the students and I, pounding our desks, would chant three times loudly, "Blood and War and Victory!"  It drove the art teacher downstairs crazy.  And I showed large chunks of classic Hollywood movies like Spartacus and Quo Vadis?

David Buchholz

Are you sure you're retired? Can I take your class?

Philip Spiess

Dave, like an old war-horse, I'll teach at the drop of a hat if anybody asks me (do war-horses teach or just charge?  I'll teach and not charge, at least not much).  The crazy thing was that what I taught for eight years was Prehistoric and Ancient History through Alexander the Great (5th Grade), and Roman History, the Dark Ages, and the Middle Ages up through the Age of Exploration (6th Grade) -- all historical subjects which I had never had at WHHS or at any time in college or graduate school -- I was an expert in the 19th Century!  As they say, you learn as you teach.  What I found really exhilarating was teaching "World Religions" as part of Geography:  I taught "Intro. to Judaism" and "Intro. to Hinduism" to the 5th Grade, and "Intro. to Christianity" and "Intro. to Islam" to the 6th Grade (I was supposed also to teach "Intro. to Buddhism," but we always ran out of time).  And both grades got a healthy dose of lingusitic history:  Latin origins of English, but also Germanic origins of English; language teaches you a hell of a lot about history.

Nelson Abanto

I just read the Iliad a few months ago for about the 1000th time.  I read "The Lays of Ancient Rome" at the same time but that was only my 500th time.  I've only read the Odyssey about 100 times.  It just doesn't have the same effect for me.  It sounds like an excuse I would come up with for being 10years late for dinner.

David Buchholz

I'm back from a five day vacation renting a house at Sonoma County's Sea Ranch, an oceanfront community about three hours north of the Bay Area.  (I can't go anywhere without a camera.}  To make the ocean look like this, I headed down this morning to a neaby cliff (with a flashlight) at 6 am and took this 30 second time exposure of the waves crashing in on  the foggy Sonoma County coastline.  Where else would anyone want to be at 6 am while on vacation?

David Buchholz

And then, of course on a much smaller scale, there are tidepools...

Laura Reid (Pease)

Dave, absolutely gorgeous!!

Ann Shepard (Rueve)

Dave, YOU ROCK!!!