(Eikoh Goya/Stars and Stripes)
Machinato, Okinawa, April 1958: Shosei Itokazu, a local Okinawan employee of the U.S. Army Quartermaster Group Laundry and Dry Cleaning Branch at Machinato on Okinawa, removes sheets from one of the 16 washers at the branch laundry. The washer can clean 225 sheets in 45 minutes.
Operating 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mon-Fri, and 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, one of the largest laundry and dry cleaning branches in the Pacific processed up to two and a half million pieces of laundry per quarter in 1958 and handled anything from bed linens to coats and sweaters.
Stars and Stripes photo collection, held in the newspapers archives in the Pacific and Europe holds a trove of images documenting military life. And its archives team is slowly but surely digitizing them.
If you look closely at this 1956 photograph, you can see the red edit marks made by the photo editor to indicate how the image should be cropped and published in the printed paper, as well as grey shading to create more contrast of the employee’s hair against the dark wall. As the vast majority of pre-1964 Stars and Stripes Pacific negatives and slides were unwittingly destroyed by poor temporary storage in 1963, the prints developed from the late 1940s through 1963 are the only images left of Stripes’ news photography from those decades — with the exception the negatives of some 190 pre-1964 photo assignment found recently. Stars and Stripes’ archives team is scanning these prints and negatives to ensure their preservation.
October is Archives Month, so keep your eye out for more treasures from the Stars and Stripes Archives on the Archive Photo of the Day pages. Have a question for our archivist? Submit it here!
AloJapan.com