View-Master Synchronicity

The View-Master with three of its reels. The red stamp reads "Defective: Not For Sale," which may be how they wound up at a state hospital.

Synchronicity. My sisters have been doing some very deep cleaning, including going through things of Mom's that haven't really been looked at since she died in 2005. My sister Brenda, who some of you know as Nurse Sis, brought a box to me today that included a very early View-Master with a dozen or so reels.

Wonderful! I love 3D toys. But how old was it? Whose was it? What was its story?

We found a clue on the back of one reel, a stamp reading "S.D. State Sanatorium." In 1944, when Mom was 4 and 5, she and her brother, Cal, contracted tuberculosis and were quarantined to a sanatorium near Custer, South Dakota. They were the only children in the facility. The stamp told me that the View-Master was one of my Mom's very few permitted pleasures during the year they were confined to the hospital. 

The tell-tale clue: a stamp on a single reel.

Mom as a girl at the sanatorium. I have just a couple of photos like this and looked for the View-Master in them. Didn't find it.

Looking through the reels, they're typical travelogues and fairy tales: the Grand Canyon, Mt. Rainier, Niagara Falls, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White (non-Disney). And then there was one that made me gasp: the New York World's Fair of 1939.

The New York World's Fair!

Long-time readers will recall that the first chapter of my graphic novel Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? took place at that fair. Some of the sights Mom saw through her View-Master in 1944 were nearly duplicated by me 65 years later when I drew them for my book (which she did not live to read). She and I were unknowingly enchanted by the same event two lifetimes apart. 

The Avenue of Flags. On the left, I did my best to photograph the tiny View-Master slide using a light box; on the right is how I drew the same scene for my book. Note the triangular Trylon and spherical Perisphere in the background of both images.

The Circle of Life sometimes unwinds in mysterious, delightful, and slightly chill-inducing ways.

(BTW, if I ever tackle another big work of graphic medicine, it will be about Mom's time as a child in that sanatorium. It's a good story.)