Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (1317-1320)

See the previous post in this series here.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are many thousands of these slides. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Getting your pictures processed as slides used to be pretty common but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides from the late 1950s that I acquired after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.

This set continues a large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a friend or family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date.

Click the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

All of the photos in this set are unlabeled and undated but are likely from the late 1950s or early 1960s. All of these are versions of the images processed with color correction and Digital ICE. Without that they consisted of barely discernible shades of red.

I believe the first photo was taken in Mexico as previous photos from whatever event this is featured a mariachi band:

The second photo features the Washington Monument:

A Google image search helped me identify the third photo. It is the Illinois Memorial in Vicksburg National Military Park:

The last photo is the most interesting. It features the Sprague which was the world's largest steam powered sternwheeler towboat. Nicknamed 'Big Mama' it was built in 1901 and used for more than 40 years towing mostly coal and oil up and down the Mississippi and Ohio rivers (among others). It could push vast amounts of cargo setting records for coal (the equivalent of 1,500 railroad cars) and oil (11 million gallons). The Sprague was decommissioned in 1948 in Memphis, TN and then used as a floating museum in Vicksburg, MS. Sadly, the Sprague burned in 1974. This photo was probably taken between 1959 and 1962. I'm basing that on another very similar photo I found (see below). It looks like in the one I have that a new paint job was in progress. In the other (presumably slightly later) photo, the paint job is finished but pretty much everything else in the picture looks identical. This photo was taken in the winter and the other was taken in the spring or summer (probably immediately after):

This photo was found at https://steamboats.com/museum/davet-photossprague.html where a lot more info and photos of the Sprague can be found:

The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can also be found here.