Peterson Pipe Notes

I fell under the spell of the camera at a fairly early age when my cousin Richard was in the Air Force and stationed in Japan. He knew of my enthusiasm (I haunted camera shops as frequently as pipe shops in those days) and offered to get me some gear at the PX at much lower prices than I could in the US. Several months later I got a big box from him with a Konica T3 SLR, some lens and a bunch of filters. Fast forward forty years and my two interests merged: taking photos of pipes. After a quick email tutorial from John Sutherland at Laudisi Enterprises I was in business, this time with digital gear. There’s nothing that flattens the learning curve as quickly as an end goal—in my case, to photograph much of what you saw in The Peterson Pipe: The Story of Kapp & Peterson. I got better as I went along, of course, and operating with no budget helped hone my skills no end. Of course the amateur work sometimes shows, but I’m still pleased with the book's photography as well as what has been accumulating here on Peterson Pipe Notes since then. I fall into that category of would-be writers who often begin with an image in their heads and then go on to write about it, so that it sometimes happens that the banner for a blog post is created before any of the writing is done. Growing up with comic books, I suppose I've never grown out of the enjoyment that illustrations add to a text, and with pipes they seem absolutely essential. The blog has been an ideal way to get into the details of pipe engineering and finish, things that are far outside the scope of what a book can get away with or a commercial website find viable. To cut to the chase, rather than send out Christmas cards to everyone (fun but expensive) or send all the RSS subscribers a new Peterson pipe (even more fun and more expensive), I decided to share with you some my favorite banners and images and their backstories from the past eight years of the blog. How it can have been that long is one of those space/time conundrums that I can’t wrap my head around, but I hope my heart is in the right place in wishing you and your loved ones the very best of the holiday season. Beannachtaí na Nollag duit! The blessings of Christmas be with you!   I. "In the Attic" My grandparents were farmers whose fields bordered Route 66 in southeast Missouri.  They lived in a large two-story house built by my great-grandparents not long after the Civil War. It had a porch wrapping around two sides and a floored attic you could stand up in. Almost anything might be found there, from trunks with turn-of-the-century clothing to sawed-off shot-guns for hanging off the tractor to stacks of cigar boxes. This was real magic. When…