Update, June 16, 8:57 a.m.: Since this story was published, Dimoff and Purvis have been in touch. "I'll be mailing the camera and the prints to him," Dimoff said Thursday.

Mel Purvis was looking through a story a friend sent him on Facebook on Wednesday when he saw something that stopped him mid-scroll.

"I almost fell out of my chair," he said over the phone Thursday. "That's me."

Purvis was looking at picture of him and his wife, Karen, his grandmother, Faye Gardner, and his young son, Tristan, standing in the Purvis yard in Eugene, 37 years ago.

On Wednesday, The Oregonian/OregonLive published a story about local photographer Kati Dimoff, who finds old film in cameras at Goodwill and develops the film. In May, she found an Argus C2. When she got the images developed, she found pictures of Mount St. Helens erupting.

Dimoff shared the images with The Oregonian/OregonLive, along with a picture of a family from the same camera, in hopes that someone would recognize the family and be able to identify the person who took the Mount. St. Helens pictures.

Mel and Karen have lived in Bend since 2001. Their son Tristan passed away in 2009.

Purvis believes that photo, along with several photos of Mount St. Helens erupting, are from his grandmother's camera.

"My grandmother had come to Eugene to visit her great-grandson," he said. The family had gone to a football game at Autzen Stadium.

"It was in 1980 because my son was born in 1979," he said. "He would have been a little over a year old."

Purvis said his grandmother, his mother's mother, was born in 1899 and came to Oregon from Nebraska.

"She was a very independent woman," he said, who owned her own women's clothing store in St. Helens at a time when it was rare for a woman to own a business.

"She used to take us fishing," Purvis said. "She was big rock hound, too."

The mountain that would eventually erupt was always in the distance in St. Helens, where Purvis grew up, and he remembers that when he was a pre-teen, Gardner once climbed part of the way up Mount St. Helens and broke her leg.

Gardner died in 1981 and Purvis isn't sure what happened to her things or how her camera made it to a Goodwill in Portland. But the timing, he said, gives him goose bumps.

"My mother just passed away on Saturday," he said.

-- Lizzy Acker

503-221-8052

lacker@oregonian.com, @lizzzyacker