My Viewmaster set was gift to me at around the age of 8. I don’t remember who gave it to me, possibly my sister and her husband. I’m guessing it was a pretty expensive item, though I have not been able to locate what the retail sale price was in about 1950.

I received the black Viewmaster viewer, the purple and cream bakelite storage box and several viewing reels. (The Viewmaster was an updated stereoscopic viewer. There were seven “views” per reel, based on 14 slides. The slides were on circular discs, and the reel rotated through the viewer. The separate slides for each eye created the stereo or 3-D effect.)

This was in the very early days of television (a small box with a fuzzy black and white image), so the Viewmaster was more attractive in several ways: it was in wonderful Kodachrome color, and it was portable. There was, for me, also the attraction of a collection as a collection. The slide file reminded me of the card catalogs at the public library; so this was my own little library.

Thus, I became a Viewmaster reel collector. I saved my allowance, which was probably a generous twenty-five cents. I’m guessing the reels cost about ninety-nine cents apiece, (that would be about $11.00 today). My favorites were of the National Parks: Carlsbad Caverns, Crater Lake, The Grand Canyon, The Great Smokey Mountains, Mount Vernon, Monument Valley, Sequoia National Park, Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Zion. I also had some reels of wild animals in Africa, but only one animated reel that I remember, Disney’s “Snow White.”

Many Friday evenings (Friday was payday!) we would go to the big Payless Drug Store at 19th Street and Telegraph Avenue in beautiful downtown Oakland. The Payless Drug store was the first and largest Payless store. It was a sea of merchandise, and they had a large Viewmaster reel selection. Sometimes I had planned my next purchase in advance; other times, I bought on impulse.

Over the years I must have bought several dozen Viewmaster reels. In college, I realized that this was a valuable asset that basically didn’t have a place in my twenty-something apartment and I sold the whole set. Interestingly, my interest in photography was to emerge a few years later, and now, 60 years later, I still find myself involved with slides and images of all sorts.