| Comments by Ken
Schory Every summer when I was a kid, through the 1950's and into the '60's, my parents would take me -- or ship me -- from the Chicago suburbs where I grew up to my grandparents' antebellum home on Lake Ontario, north of Buffalo, which they called "Cedarcroft" after its enormous cedar hedges. It was a wonderful place, with a thousand things to amuse an inquisitive boy -- and his grandfather. Gramps was forever engaged in a variety of projects, and he never minded my looking over his shoulder. He was a resourceful, self-sufficient kind of guy. Equally adept at prose or poetry, he would often work late at night on letters, journals, or articles he submitted to Popular Mechanics or other magazines for publication. More often, I found him in his workshop, inventing new kinds of stringed instruments or gizmos that would make him a millionaire. But never did. Most of all, friends admired him and looked to him for his insights and good company. His father was a minister and skilled carpenter. At first, Gramps thought he would be a minister, too, and enrolled in the religious studies program (which he referred to as "Divinity School") at Hobart College in Geneva, New York, on Seneca Lake. However, after just a year or two, "all that dogma" didn't agree with him and he switched to Cornell's Forestry program in Ithaca, on Lake Cayuga, the next Finger Lake over. Upon graduation, he spent the summer in Idaho, worked as an engineer on the Niagara Power facility, took odd jobs like fixing radios during the Great Depression, and designed industrial equipment for several companies in the Buffalo area for the remainder of his career. But his heart was at home and in his projects -- like this journal. Our family has perhaps half a dozen of his journals, including one that describes his experiences at the family's summer cottage on Georgian Bay, on the east side of Lake Huron. In 1973, a year before he died, I visited him at his home. When the subject of photography came up, this journal came to mind and, with a twinkle in his eye, he went and got it. I'd seen it before, but he made a special point of explaining to me that, of all the journals he had written, this was his favorite. He often reminisced fondly about that summer on Coolwater Mountain, and wanted me to know how important it was to him. It took me ten years to get around to it, but in the summer of 1983, 67 years after his now-famous "Odyssey," I went to Idaho and visited Coolwater Lookout. Much had changed, but much was the same, near as I could tell from his pictures. While there, I took several photographs from approximately the same vantage points as his, and have included them in this section. The idea that I was standing in the same places he was, so long ago, gave me "chills." When you click on a "thumbnail" image you'll get a page with both versions of the image, for comparison.
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