Blast From The Past – Mid 1980’s – I can’t recall the exact year this photo was made at this time. A bit more research will nail it down though. This is my friend Norm Grant and his son Dale Grant at the Colorado Railway Museum at Golden, Colorado. Norm, his wife Gloria and Dale (my Godson) were avid volunteers at the Museum for many years and they helped out on firing and running Rio Grand 346.

I have always been interested in photographing trains, but I attribute Norm and Dale as the ones that fired up that passion to what it is today! We were all stationed together at Rhein Main Air Base in West Germany for three years and we chased and photographed trains around West Germany and other areas of Europe during that time. When I was reassigned to the states in 1981 and Norm left the service we have continued to be family over the years and meet up a various places for visits and railfan trips. Although Norm has left this world for a better place, his son continues today as an engineer for the BNSF Railway.

According to Wikipedia: The Colorado Railroad Museum is a non-profit railroad museum. The museum is located on 15 acres at a point where Clear Creek flows between North and South Table Mountains in Golden, Colorado.

The museum was established in 1959 to preserve a record of Colorado’s flamboyant railroad era, particularly the state’s pioneering narrow gauge mountain railroads.

The museum building is a replica of an 1880s-style railroad depot. Exhibits feature original photographs by pioneer photographers such as William Henry Jackson and Louis Charles McClure, as well as paintings by Howard L Fogg, Otto Kuhler, Ted Rose and other artists. Locomotives and railroad cars modeled in the one inch scale by Herb Votaw are also displayed. A bay window contains a reconstructed depot telegrapher’s office, complete with a working telegraph sounder.

The lower level of the museum building contains an exhibition hall which features seasonal and traveling displays on railroading history. The lower level also contains the Denver HO Model Railroad Club’s “Denver and Western” operating HO and HOn3 scale model train layout that represent Colorado’s rail history in miniature.

The Robert W. Richardson Library houses over 10,000 rare historic photographs, Denver & Rio Grande Western Railway no 683 was built in 1890 by the Baldwin locomotive works and spent much of his time, pulling coal trains in the eastern United States it was donated to the Colorado Railroad Museum in July 9th 1982.

Denver & Rio Grande Western railroad no 346 was built in July 1881 by the Baldwin locomotive Works in Philadelphia Pennsylvania does 346 has its very own class sister the locomotive number 318.

Blast From The Past – I know this KC-10 air to air photo was shot along the coast of California, but can’t recall the exact date. I can say that it’s indicative of some of the many missions I flew over my 24 years in the Air Force. Part of my job during those years was to photograph the many different types of aircraft as they performed their missions.

Sometimes this involved flying backseat in a fighter jet, but most times it was shooting from the back ramp of another jet or even prop plane while tethered by a harness in the event there was severe turbulence and the plane suddenly dropped or shook. Fortunately I always stayed inside the plane untill it reached the ground!!

Blast From The Past – January 6, 2013 – Working for 17 years as a photojournalist for The Messenger Newspaper here in Madisonville, Ky had me covering a lot of interesting assignments and Brian T. was one of those folks!

Brian T. was heading down North Main Street pulling a cross on this Sunday as he headed home from being baptized at Christ View Fellowship Church in Madisonville. Brian didn’t want his last name used as he wants all the glory of his actions to go to God. He thinks he’s covered about 30 miles so far carrying his cross. – Photo by Jim Pearson, The Messenger Newspaper, Madisonville, Ky

Blast From The Past – March 23, 2010 – Madisonville-North Hopkins High Schools Jordan Wilson clears a high hurdle during Maroons opening track meet in 2010, with Maarten Adams hot on his heels. – Photography by Jim Pearson/The Messenger Newspaper

Blast From The Past – Fall, 1980 – Here we find my on assignment taking information in the field for a caption during a military exercise in Germany called Reforger. Over the years I was part of the Combat Camera team that covered this annual exercise. The acronym stands for Return of Forces to Europe and involved the joint participation by many countries.

According to Wikipedia: Exercise Campaign Reforger (from return of forces to Germany) was an annual exercise and campaign conducted, during the Cold War, by NATO. The exercise was intended to ensure that NATO had the ability to quickly deploy forces to West Germany in the event of a conflict with the Warsaw Pact. Although most troops deployed were from the United States, the operation also involved a substantial number of troops from other NATO countries including Canada and the United Kingdom.

The Reforger exercise itself was first conceived in 1967. During the ongoing Vietnam War, the President Lyndon Johnson administration announced plans to withdraw approximately two divisions from Europe in 1968. As a demonstration of its continuing commitment to the defense of NATO and to illustrate its capability of rapid reinforcement, a large scale force deployment was planned that would deploy a division or more to West Germany in a regular annual exercise.

The first such exercise was conducted beginning on 6 January 1969. These exercises continued annually past the end of the Cold War, except for the year 1989, until 1993. Reforger 1975 marked the operational presence of the United States Marine Corps in Europe for the first time since World War I when the 2nd Marine Division’s 32nd Marine Amphibious Unit (32nd MAU) was deployed from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, as part of that exercise. Reforger 1988 was billed as the largest European ground maneuver since the end of World War II as 125,000 troops were deployed.

Reforger was not merely a show of force—in the event of a conflict, it would be the actual plan to strengthen the NATO presence in Europe. In that instance, it would have been referred to as Operation Reforger. Important components in Reforger included the Military Airlift Command, the Military Sealift Command, and the Civil Reserve Air Fleet.

The U.S. Army also increased its rapid-reinforcement capability by prepositioning huge stocks of equipment and supplies in Europe at POMCUS sites. The maintenance of this equipment has provided extensive on-the-job training to reserve-component support units.

Blast From The Past – Summer, 1999 – Those were the days! Here I’m working on shooting on the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railway with my 8X20″ panoramic view camera somewhere around Chama, New Mexico with my godson Dale Grant. He, his dad Norm and good friend Jose Lopez Jr. all met up at Chama for a weekend of chasing the trains.

It was an interesting camera and one of several pan cameras I’ve owned over the years during the film days. The only one I still have left is a 4×10″ Alt View, built by Patrick Alt in Los Angeles, California at the time. Now with the scarcity of film and processing chemicals it too may go up for sale here before long. Now it’s just a nice display piece as I no longer even have a darkroom setup here at home.

I was, like many, was brought up in the film age of photography and I attribute my “seeing” to what I learned over the years of shooting film and having to know what my photo was going to look like as I shot it without looking at it right afterwards, as we do today with digital.

I have to admit we have come a long way from film since the first digital cameras I used in the Air Force back in the late 1970s. In some ways it’s much better and in others not so much, but either way, shooting film I feel has made me “see” pictures better when I’m out shooting digital today.