TheGrelicksCollection

Part 2. (Part 1 was here.)

Guess what...

To the Anon that just sent me this 1946 article about AMFOGE (see relevant posts here and here): thanks!

There’s also the above British Pathé newsreel available on Youtube...

A HAF Canadair CL-215 firefighting aircraft in a b&w photo taken by my late father, T.K., with his trustful Kiev camera, apparently in the late ’70s.

The first CL-215s entered service with the HAF in 1973 and, although in 1999 the newer turboprop CL-415s came to strengthen the Greek firefighting aerial fleet, some of the original 215s, with their WWII radial engines are still in service, doing their best every summer.

I have some twenty photos like this, taken in my childhood by my father, myself or even my younger brother: in other words, a wildfire, followed by the spectacular aerial ballet of the Canadairs, was more or less a permanent feature of summer vacations. The deep sound of their old piston engines was and still is a reassuring sign that help was/is on its way.

On board a riverboat... somewhere in Germany, in the 1930s... – or so I understand.

This comes from a little photo album of an unnamed German family, containing some 45 snapshots from the 1930s. Printed mostly on Agfa Lupex paper, some on Agfa Brovira; a few of them (not this one) were printed at a photo lab in Dresden.

No need to elaborate, is there? This comes from the same lot of photos as this one – but that’s a different girl. The plane is a post-war Cub variant, and that’s probably the late ’40s or early ’50s. (eBay purchase, Grelicks collection.)

[Athens], April 10, 1961. Found photo, from the Sevasti P. lot.

Given the Spring date, I thought this was probably taken on Easter. Then I checked: in 1961, Easter day was on April 9. Which, in a way, makes it even more interesting: family and friends getting together around a table even on Easter Monday.

A short break from the Piper Cub series, for a bit of Cessna (although, admittedly, a Cessna NOT as beautiful as this one).

The time seems to be November 1957.

The aircraft is Cessna 195 (1947-1954) N1008D c/n 7616, built in 1950, which according to the FAA is still around.

The place is apparently Chicago Midway Airport, established in 1923 as Chicago Air Park, then Chicago Municipal Airport, renamed after the eponymous WWII battle in 1949, now Chicago Midway International Airport.

The company is “Midway Airlines”  – but this is neither one of the two “Midway Airlines” you can find in Wikipedia.

According to Ed Coates: “There have been several airlines with this name. However, so far as I know, this was the first one. Midway was a commuter airline based at Chicago's Midway Airport in 1950 (before O'Hare was opened) with a small fleet of four Cessna 195s, and offered flights to various locales in the Greater Chicago area (Meigs Field, et al). [...] Midway ceased operations in 1953.“ (to be checked, as our photo here was taken in 1957).

You can see a full view of one of her sister ships, N9325A, from the Ed Coates collection here.

Some other US airport photo posts: here.

Fresh from the family archives (my mother just found this photo and gave it to me): this is one of my oncle Loukas’s ( a brother of my mother’s mother) cars. My mother thought this was a Studebaker (apparently a name that had stuck in the family’s recollections), but I rather think this is a Pontiac. Update: yeap, JTM seems to be right, this looks indeed like a 1953 Pontiac Chieftain! :))

March 1946 parade, Salonica, Greece. Photo taken by an American member of AMFOGE (see previous posts) and printed on Agfa Brovira paper by “PHOTO E. MELANIDIS, TSIMISKI STREET 30, SALONICA”. (off eBay purchase, Grelicks collection).

“Mom, we took this photo on the ship, on our way to Santorini. There was a lot of wind, so it isn’t very good. But, since it shows the three of us together, I wanted you to have it. - M.”