Kimler Adventure Pages (http://randsco.com)

See how searching for an EXIF program, led me to find a 50 year old photo of my mother on the Internet! (She was then "Miss Marilyn Dyer") SURPRISE MOM!!

The Things You Find on the Internet!

Camp Wolters: Here's an aerial view of Camp Wolters, taken sometime prior to 1963. During WWII, Camp Wolters was the largest infantry replacement training center in the United States (it covered 7,500 acres, reaching a peak troop capacity of 24,973). It's certainly larger than what I suspected.

I didn't get much done today, as my nose led me tripping across the Internet. The bloody web, eh? It can be such a time waster.

During my travels however, I happened to dig up an old photograph of my mother (a certain Miss. Marilyn Dyer) taken in 1957! If it surprised me, my bet is that it will really surprise her!

When she met my father, she was working at Camp Wolters, just outside of Mineral Wells, Texas. (They were both living there, my dad as an army dude - not sure his rank or duty. Funny how little we actually know about our own parents.) Mom however, was the Assistant Director of the Camp Service Club. (I bet she had lots of guys asking her out on dates, because, being single and setting up all those social activities, you're just bound to meet lots of cute guys.)

Wedding Chapel: My parents were married in this church (2006 photo), at Camp Wolters, just a tad over 50 years ago! (Happy 50th wedding anniversary Mom & Dad!)

So my dad stood out from the crowd at Camp Wolters. They met there and married there too, at the little church that was on the base. The church is still there, but Camp Wolters (later called Fort Wolters) is no longer. An Army camp from 1925 to 1946 Camp Wolters was deactivated for a time. It became an Air Force base in 1951, but in 1956, it reverted to the Army to house the U.S. Army Primary Helicopter School. Camp Wolters was renamed "Fort Wolter" in 1963, when it was designated as a "permanent" military base. The base was deactivated in 1973 and now the site is an industrial park, National Guard training center and a Weatherford College branch campus.

To find out what led me to discover my mom's old photo, to see the photo and a bit more about Camp Wolters ... trip on to the next page!

Scan-tastic Mate!

The Family Tome: Two worn, leather-bound photo albums make up the Kimler family pictoral history. Wrinkled babies, adventure travels & gradually older-looking people attest to years of good living! Now they're all scanned (backed-up) and brought into the 21st century (even though scads are still in black and white).

The Oop and I took our little vacation to visit paternal grandparents, in California, last month. One of the things on the agenda was to return home with the family photo album. I wanted to get all of the images scanned, as a form of backup, but also to include in blog articles.

For the past two days - solid - I have been scanning old photos. The good news is that they're all done (about 900 photos total). The bad news is that they're just raw scans and need rotating, cropping, cleaning and some, a bit of photo-correcting. I'm sick of scanning, I'll tell you!

I started the morning by looking for a good batch EXIF editor, which I'll use to add things like the year of the photo and a description of what's on the photo (names, places, etc.) There's nothing more useless than an old photo of "who were those people?" or "was this on the trip to Sequoia in 1968 or Colorado in 1970?"

Oddly, I began with the very first photo in the family album, which was a picture of the Camp Wolters entrance sign - where my parents met.

Assistant Service Club Director: (Miss Marilyn Dyer) ... my Mom! Then 22 years old, just about to turn 23 and planning on getting married to a certain bloke in just a few months! Hehehe ... you never know what you're going to turn up on the Internet!

My Not-Yet-Mom at Camp Wolters!

I thought, "Hmmm, what do I know about Camp Wolters (besides it being an Army base where my parents met and married?"

The answer, sadly, was "not much".

So, I typed "camp wolters" into the address bar of (not the best of browsers, but the one I use most often) IE7 and immediately spied the wikipedia entry - which I utilized, when paraphrasing its history. The wikipedia entry had some external links and one was to A Pictoral History of Fort Wolters.

My gosh! What a lot of data is stored on that site! I found maps, pictures, esoteric information, documents, etc. A person could get lost in all that data. (And I did, for a while).

After discovering the cool search function, I gave it a whirl and that's when "Marilyn Dyer" popped up with a text-link (and the photo on the preceeding page). Cool! Mom before she became "Mrs. Kimler"!