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Thursday, March 21, 2013

Sidney Baker Street Bridge -- mystery solved!

The photos I posted of the Sidney Baker Street bridge in Kerrville were something of a mystery.  They were in with some photographs taken by Starr Bryden, a pioneer photographer in our area.  The photos looked to be taken around 1975 -- but Bryden died in 1959.  So the mystery was this: who took the photographs?
Sidney Baker Street Bridge, Kerrville, mid-1970s.
Today I received this email:


Hey Joe,

OK, you are probably not going to believe this, but I think that I took those pictures of the Sidney Baker Street Bridge!

When I was a junior at Tivy I took a photography class and got hooked by the camera bug. Perhaps some of Star Bryden rubbed off on me. I knew that the bridge was going to be dismantled, so one day after school I went around and took pictures of it. This would have been in 1975 I'm pretty sure. . In the second picture taken from the sidewalk by the hospital you can see the large orange construction sign to the right of the bridge. It was announcing the dates that the bridge was going to be closed.  In another one from below, you can see an orange crane. They had not started the construction yet, but it was about to start, so I went all around taking pictures of it. I distinctly remember going up to the 7th floor of the hospital and taking a picture from the window of the employees break room. I also remember taking those pictures from below the bridge including the one of the old grand stand that was left over from the ski shows.

In all of my searching through our house in Kerrville since my mother died I have been hoping that I would come across those pictures, but never have. I haven't even seen the negatives. If I am correct, those pictures were taken with a little Kodak 110 camera which used a very narrow film.

Where did you find them? I'm guessing that my mother must have donated them to the library or the historical society sometime in the past 38 years, because I have not seem them since high school.

I'm really not crazy! But when I saw the first picture I thought it looked familiar. Then the more I looked I began to realize that those really looked exactly like the pictures that I took that day.

Thanks a lot and take care.

Steve Meeker

Well, there you go.  Mystery solved!

2 comments:

  1. I love this type of mystery.

    It was a lot of fun to learn about the origin of the photos.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Back in my high school days, there were a few incidents of the braver sort to jump off the bridge into the river below. Probably happened more than a few times before and after.

    ReplyDelete

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