This text was obtained via automated optical character recognition.
It has not been edited and may therefore contain several errors.

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Monday, November 27, 1995
Dear Russell:
Here are some photocopies to continue our conversation about your latest developments of local history on the coast.
The photocopies came out reasonably well, considering the poor state of the originals, so I am sending only the photocopies at this time.
I experimented with varying intensities of light/dark, and I enlarged some a bit from the original size. The originals are either mounted into holders or actually pasted to a cardboard. I have some other ones, too, so we will see whether they might be of interest even if poorer quality.
One page with three shots has what might be the clearest shot of the hotel itself, taken from the Waveland side. How fingerprints got onto these pictures I have no idea. But notice the scene labeled "from hotel balcony":	to	the left background, what you can
barely make out is the end of the 900 foot pier that the 47 hurricane destroyed. In the foreground you might be able to make out Daddy's 1941 Buick, that big car which lasted through the war, and which I think you had an accident in later on????
One set of three pages has four shots from different angles.
Another set of three is less helpful, but I send it on anyway.
The final page is during and after the fire. Not very clear, but in the original you can see some bits of smoke in the three front shots. The fourth picture on that page is taken some time later, when Daddy had some workers attach chains to the columns to pull them down for fear they might fall on someone. You can see one column coming down. The scratched out captions are something I had written in my funereal style at the time—something about "last breath" and "removing the bones," I think. In a time of better judgment I was embarrassed by the captions and scratched them out!
So you even have some evidence here of a growth in my literary style . . . !
In time maybe I can get some better copies. Meanwhile, have fun with these.