It appears that on his days off, Joel played the tourist or he bounced back and forth between training sites.
He visited multiple places in Florida and left us a few slides behind so we can piece some of it back together.
On Sunday August 8, 1943, Joel is in Lakeland, Florida. All we have with certainty is the Kodachrome below. There are quite a few undocumented images in this stack, all clearly in Florida based on scenery or subject.
One week later Joel visits Sulphur Springs, North of Tampa, and Tarpon Springs, North of Clearwater.
And we are no longer surprised to see Joel take photographs of flowers and boats in a harbor.
Slides have numbers 14 and 19 stamped in them, so there were definitely more. The slides I was able to purchase and scan, are not “perfect” Kodachromes, so these may all be rejects that Joel didn’t toss at the time.
Next proof of Florida presence comes with four slides taken in Sarasota on Wednesday, August 25, 1943.
Above slides are stamped consecutive 8 and 9 and are clearly from the same building.
The Ringlings Museum would only open in 1947, for a history of this museum, see the link at the bottom of this blogpost.
There were quite a few other Kodachrome slides in this stack without any way of placing them in location or time.
Joel with staged images for history.
And few more random 1943 Florida slides to close off. The last few slides don’t have numbers stamped in the cardboard frames. Joel might have used a different processing center since he was in Florida.
Joel would leave behind quite a few images of sunsets throughout his career. The above ones are slightly underexposed. I just couldn’t resist showing them as Joel found it important to capture this moment.
Joel kept everything in boxes, and that includes in some cases the ends of the film with half an image on it. See above.
I’ve included a Florida map below, incorporating all the locations mentioned above. Florida had some 170 military facilities during WWII, up from 8. So, it shouldn’t be a major surprise that many of our WWII vets passed through Florida at one or other point in their journey.
Camp Murphy, a Signal Corps training center, similar to Camp Kohler in California, was in Martin County, NW of Jupiter.
Civilian contractors trained some 14,000 cadet pilots, including many of Great Britain, at Lakeland (and Avon Park) from 1940 to 1945.
Tampa had the Drew and MacDill airfields with Army Airfields at Sarasota and many other locations. These are all locations Joel visited or trained at.
We’ll track more of Joel’s WWII whereabouts when the materials present themselves in future blogposts.
Cheers !
NOTE:
Finding Joel Pahl Dardis 