Random Old Photo of the Day: spring 1979

Jason McGathey
3 min readFeb 7, 2023
party time at 748 Mojo Street

Man, I searched high and low for this bad boy, over a series of days, before finally stumbling upon it. This is one of my all-time favorite family photos and also, I think, encapsulates the 1970s more than maybe any picture I have ever seen. If I ever wrote a book about that decade, this would be a series candidate for the cover.

There’s just so much more going into these artifacts, beyond what they are depicting. The place (which you can still visit, relatively unchanged on the exterior) and the time (which you cannot, as far as anyone knows), sure, but there’s also the physical medium to consider, these square photos from that era with the really durable but kind of hazy looking stock, often with a yellowish tint as this one has, and the date in blue (see below) on the back.

Most of all we must consider the unlikely congruence of these people, which will never happen again: that’s my dad in front with the basketball, and four year old me looking away from the camera. Those cut-ups in the middle are my uncles Lyle and Allie — it’s incredible to think that Lyle, on the left, was just a junior in high school at the time. Allie, with his finger in the air there, spent most of his working years as a police officer, but this career was not even a glimmer in his eye just yet.

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