Author: john@altacircle.com
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One Day in Cambridge
In 1953 two first-year Harvard Business School students, Francis E Baker (HC ‘51, HBS ‘55) and Gérard Fabry (HBS ‘55), were walking back from Cambridge when they decided, as Gerry recalls, that they should drive to Rio de Janeiro. That was the decision that launched a 16,000 mile “car trip” on the Pan American…
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The Very Rough Road to Rio — Hagerty Drivers Club Article
This month the article for the Hagerty Drivers Club magazine has been printed and published online: https://www.hagerty.com/media/great-reads/the-rough-road-to-rio-an-mg-adventure-for-the-ages Great work by Stefan Lombard, the Editor at Large of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. He really took an initial article I had and a set of press clippings, and brought in so much more. Credit to Kim Dyson…
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ICP PhotoSLAM
On April 3, I presented the Pan America 1954 project in an ICP PhotoSLAM at ICP, the International Center of Photography. A PhotoSLAM is a format created by ICP faculty member Idris Soloman. It is a mix between The Moth radio hour and a poetry slam, with photography. Five or six photographers apply to present…
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An Individual’s Past Inspiring the Future
I’ve been a bit distracted lately with work and organizing a memorial for my Uncle, Herbert Barry III. This is probably better posted on my personal blog which is buried inside Altacircle.com somewhere, but since the eulogy I wrote is really about the past inspiring the future, I’m going to post it here. I should…
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Launching on Substack
As funny as it is to say, I recognized a while ago that I’m an old school new media marketer. I love blogs and websites. I like long form content and photographs. I like CRM systems and automatic marketing that gives people what they ask for with timing and personalization that can turn spam into…
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Enjoying Archival Investigations
One of the interesting challenges I’m finding with this collection is determining where a given photo was taken. Needless to say location tagging didn’t happen on 35mm slides and metal frames don’t provide for written notes. Unfortunately we don’t have any slideshow write-ups and the order of the slides is also suspect after 70 years.…
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The Joy of Distractions
The problem is a classic one, simple to see, and basically impossible to avoid. You start digging into a project, trying to find something you’re sure is there, and realize you need to bring order to these other things that are tied to yet another thing. Of course, all of the things are fascinating in…
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We’re Going to Miss the Newspapers
It is amazing to start in a project like this and have the power of a tool like Newspapers.com. With over a billion articles scanned and indexed, the days of digging up microfiche rolls and running them in the machines at the university library are well and truly gone. It is all about tuning your…
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Making A Professor’s Perspective Real
One of the hardest parts of this project was finding a way to counter-balance the heavy academic style of my uncle’s essays. In one of our earliest conversations he mentioned he loved comics. In looking at wikimedia’s out of copyright images, I found a way to both support the history and bring a new light…
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Working on Boston to Rio
I’ve started working on organizing and researching the trip my father did in 1954 with Gérard Fabry. The short version of the story is that instead of getting a summer internship from business school, they decided to drive from Cambridge to Rio de Janeiro in a 1953 MG TD. Sponsors, press passes, letters of introduction…