I thought this would live on in legend and lore only, until I came across this slide last night quite by chance.
For the past year, I. have been archiving the vast slide collection of my old dear friend Gill Ediger, who for a while, was a part-owner of my old shop Vreeland Graphics. Most of them aren’t online yet – I’ve put a few on Facebook to enlist help ID’ing people, but I am less than 3000 pieces into a maybe 5000 piece project. I will get them all online, probably at Flickr some day relatively soon, in geological time.

So at somewhere around the 2300 mark of slides, I came upon this in a box of uncategorized stuff. Gill was an amazing handyman. He had an electrician’s license, he could weld, he was a carpenter of some repute, he could fly helicopters, and any number of things. He was a thinker- had a head full of ideas. And if you needed something moved — I helped him move a house 10 ft for Christ’s sake — he was your man… most of the time. After we bought our first automatic press, it became clear after not very long that we needed a better dryer, so we went to the bank, got an SBA loan, and lot’s of stuff had to be re-jiggered in our old building to make space for it. We needed to move an ink shelf. I lobbied for taking all the cans off, moving the shelf, and putting them back on. Gill said “No, no, no that’ll take way to long. I’ll handle this.” I sad “Fine, I’ve got to go to home depot.” Gill jacked up that shelf with all the ink on it, put it on the big yellow cart you can see behind me in this photo, and proceeded to roll it across the shop and around a corner to its new home. While rounding the corner, something went wrong.

When I walked back in from home depot, I was greeted by the image of an utterly defeated Gill (A thing that literally never happens) sitting on an upside down 5-gallon bucket with his face in his hands. Surrounded by upended ink cans, and a busted up shelf.

After a brief interlude of “What the fuck?” and “I just don’t know,” we determined there was nothing to do but laugh and get to work. Plastisol tends to move slowly when at rest, and we did salvage about 80 percent of the ink, and slowly wiped up the rest. Not long after we began the cleanup process, Gill managed to recover his sense of humor enough to determine we should at least have a picture of the scene. He filed it away, and we both forgot it had ever been taken, until I found it last night.

I am clearly trying to have the best attitude I can in this pic, and although Felicia, while playing along, looks considerably more nonplussed. Thus ever was our marriage.