All Our Yesterdays – November 2025

    Do you remember the iconic photo, “Migrant Mother,” that so compellingly epitomized the Great Depression? Snapped by photographer Dorothea Lange in 1936, it would be another 42 years before the anonymous mother of seven was identified as Florence Owens Thompson.
    And then there’s Steve McCurry’s globally famous photograph called “Afghan Girl,” which appeared on the June 1985 cover of National Geographic magazine when she was living in a Pakistani refugee camp during the Soviet-Afghan war. The green-eyed girl was tracked down, 17 years later, to a remote region of Afghanistan.
    It took decades to locate these individuals after their photos appeared worldwide, but one mystery that doggedly remains in the sphere of anachronistic photos is the identity of the dozen or so kids making themselves comfortable on this vintage Dodge Brothers firetruck, long before the Orinda Fire District morphed into the MOFD.
    This undated photograph was snapped by photojournalist Les Sipes, a Bay Area photographer who worked for the Oakland Tribune and the Contra Costa Times from 1930 to the early ‘70s.
    Born in 1913, Sipes was 17 when he started working as a messenger for the Oakland Tribune and, in no time at all, became one of the newspaper’s most prized reporters.
    By 1937, he was running the Tribune’s new office in sleepy Walnut Creek (population 1,200), on aptly named Bonanza Street (the Britannica Dictionary defining bonanza as “something that produces very good results for someone or something”). Added to which was the perfect synchronicity of beginning a brand new venture the same year that the Caldecott Tunnel opened. Cometh the hour, cometh the man.
    By now Sipes had become a “combination man,” not only writing copy but running off to take photos the minute news broke. This included flying out of Sherman Field in Pleasant Hill on the lookout for a good story, along the Contra Costa traffic route, that he could boost with an aerial photo or two.
    During the war years, Sipes worked in the Office of Naval Intelligence and was the first investigator on the scene during the deadly Port Chicago munitions explosion in July 1944, for which he received a commendation from President Franklin Roosevelt.
    Sipes succumbed to a heart attack in 1985 and for years, his photographic negatives sat in boxes – until 2002 when his wife, Jacqui, died, and her niece, Lora Ellen Landregan, helped clear the house.
    “I packed up and saved everything from Uncle Les’s darkroom,” she said.
    But it was another 15 years before she finally found someone she trusted enough to help save her uncle’s legacy.
    “I sent local historian Mark Harrigan all the negatives as I unearthed them and he’s been a hero,” said Landregan. “Mark knew what I had. Giving him access to my uncle’s photographs is the perfect way to honor his work.”
    Harrigan admits to having been a little hesitant at first, especially since all the negatives were in very large format which few scanners could process.
    “But that’s where the Contra Costa County Historical Society came in,” Harrigan said. “They had a scanner that could digitize them and if I did the work they could keep a copy.”
    The collection can be found at cocohistory.org.
    Harrigan has definitely cornered the market in East Bay nostalgia. The creator and administrator of the “680/24 Corridor History Group” (his main Facebook group), Harrigan knows how to carry you back to those mythical “good old days.”
    His captivating vlog, “The Story of Lester Sipes, Corridor Newspaper Man,” made in 2022, will undoubtedly – to quote D. H. Lawrence – cast you “down in the flood of remembrance” where it’s likely you’ll “weep like a child for the past.”
    Meanwhile, the quest for identities in the Orinda Fire District photo continues.
    Since AI became an integral part of daily life, tech companies have invented many different ways to extract details from an image, and yet this particular one seems to have slipped through the cracks.
    Without being able to accurately date the children through their clothes, shoes and haircuts, it becomes difficult to know what side of 80 these kids might now be. One AI bot confidently declares that the photo is late 1930s, while the other swears it is pure 1960.
    Given that so many generations of the same family remain in Orinda from the cradle to the grave, it would seem reasonable to expect that someone might recognize a photo of granny when she was still at elementary school – Glorietta, Del Rey and Sleepy Hollow all opened between 1949 and 1953.
    But as to the age of the vehicle?
    “Fire trucks usually have a 15+ year life cycle,” said Perrin Kliot, a volunteer with the MOFD Support Services, “especially in smaller departments with limited funding. That means the truck in the picture could easily have been built in the 1940s and still be in service well into the 1960s.”
    And if nobody comes forward after examining this photo? Well, it’s still a beautiful day in the neighborhood, and all those busy happy faces make you want to smile.