charlesalindbergh

Looking north on Broadway in Oakland CA.

Somewhat strange to come across this (and the other) photo of Charles Lindbergh among this latest posting of circa-1920 Bain Collection photos, as Charles Lindbergh wouldn't even begin flight training (as a civilian) until April 1922. He'd join the Army Air Service in 1924, and would begin military flight training in March of that year. Here's the other aforementioned photo

This is evidence of someone not knowing their history, posting photographs.

There does seem to be a date discrepancy, which is not totally unexpected in the Bain News Photo collection. In general, dates found on the negatives can mean one of several things: they sometimes indicate when the photos were taken, but they can also refer to a later time, such as the date the photo was added to the Bain photo stock, or, sent out to subscribers of the Bain News photo service. In this case, however, the date range for the negatives, which we are loading in sequence by negative number, seems too early. It may be that Bain sometimes inserted a more recent negative in an earlier range or reused a negative number, though it seems unlikely that he would have had reason to file a photo of Charles Lindbergh much before 1922. We have at least one photo of Lindbergh that shows him ca. 1923: hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3b09833 -- certainly a youthful face there! (I'll note that we have an even more youthful depiction, showing him as a child in a sailor suit, just barely visible, leaning against his father at the opening of the 60th Congress, in which his father served: Bring up the tiff file and look towards the rear rows in the center of this photo: hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c29715.) We'll adjust the estimated date in the description and continue to ponder some of the mysteries of Bain's negative numbering practices.

Barbara (LOC P&P) Often the larger date discrepancies are in photos high in the secondary numerical sequence (the number after the dash). This one has an A added, which is also a clue. More commonly the discrepancies happen from numbers in the teens, maybe 12 and up. Perhaps the negatives were stored in catalog drawers by the primary number to the left of the dash. In cases where that series didn't fill the drawer, later pictures could have been added at the back of the drawer to fill them and avoid getting new cabinets, especially if there were only a relatively small number of glass negatives left in the collection at the time they started the practice?

The "unidentified man" is Charles Lindbergh.