Not Duck related, posted at the suggestion of Randal Johnson DD- 4625.
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One of those strange and interesting events in life.

I have a standing EBay search for "Tunnel N.Y.", a small village beside the Delaware and Hudson Railroad where I lived on my grandfather's farm during WWII. A few days ago I decided to browse all the "D & H" listings and I found, and won, a neat Tunnel N.Y. negative taken in 1946. It didn't come up in my Tunnel search as it was wrongly listed by the EBay seller in California as taken at Cheery Point N.Y. (230198577577).

The building on the right is Hattie Kales' general store and gas station. I used to earn a quarter, enough for five Pepsi's, cleaning the inside of Hattie's 1940 Oldsmobile. Behind the train you can see the top of Villecco's creamery, I hung around there and tried to helped make cheese, lots of steam and stainless. Sometimes they would pay me and a buddy 5 bucks ($2.50 each!) to shovel a train car load of coal into their boiler room hopper, about four days of hard work. The Tunnel station, with a boy standing beside it, is on the left. Ernie was the station master and he tried, without much success, to teach me how to run a real railroad. About 200 feet in front of the engine is the only road through the village and beside it is the Post Office. Inez Cook, my grandmother, was the postmistress and my job, beside checking out all the trains, was to deliver and pick up the mail bags when the mail trains arrived. All the buildings in this picture including the post office are gone, only the track, the road and the boy remain.

The reason I know all this is because the boy in this picture, taken 61 years ago, is me.

Christmas doesn't get much better than this.

Bill,

As you say, "Weird and Wonderful." Your fortunate find on EBay could almost be the opening to a Twilight Zone episode.

You be careful about accepting any "too good to be true" offers to recapture your youth. We don't want Stella to end up all by herself while Rod Serling stands outside the boatyard offering some pithy summary of your life.

Merry Xmas Bill!.....unreal!