Street Face...

So old Mary got off to the dorm last week. She has been a picture subject and co-colabrator for many of the adventures documented by this site and seems her contributions may still loom large with the posting of a couple of pictures from her high school photography class.

These were taken somewhere downtown, an unidentified man on the street. He was agreeable to be photographed, hopefully he won't mind making an appearance worldwide.

Good timeless weird old America quality, I would think that on first glance it would be hard to guess what decade this was taken.






These photos kind of bring to mind the old downtown strip of sidewalk across from the court house that was call "Spit and Whittle." Now a nice little line of reconstructed old store fronts that contain the offices of lawyers. I have heard it was the site of the original Brookshire Brothers Grocery. In the late 60s/early 70s it was an important area to me because one of the old stores along here was Jeff's Hobby Shop, a dusty disorganized place of the pre big box store era of anything you want now where a young tinkerer could hopefully find a part to repair a model car's crash or an Estes rocket engine capable of blasting a carefully constructed project into never found land.

Guys kind of like this, I think the spit and whittle crowd was mostly white since at this time it was probably pretty easy for a black man to get hassled for squatting in the street front shade near a court house across the tracks from where some thought he should be, were standing around and I passed them intent on my adolescent experiments. I look at this picture and it makes me think that those old guys, possibly this guy four decades later were stuck and idle, uncertain with the changing times. That's one thing for certain, times change, and people spit and whittle their way through it.