The first phase of the celebration of John Bedard’s life took place on the 22nd of October on a beautiful day in San Diego. The memorial mass was held at St. Charles Catholic Church in the most southwestern tip of California and the United States, where you can see the Tijuana hills and smell the random early morning wood fires that waft across the border. For a while, it was his border.

I put this retrospective together for the reception. Apologies to Marlene Dietrich and Gilles Vigneault. The presentation no doubt runs too long, but 87 years is a long time to document, even if it’s only in pictures. The pictures are chronological in the beginning of the show, but as production rolled into the day before the service, I lost some discipline. There are over 90 individual photos scanned and cropped for the slideshow.