Ohio Archives

February 13, 2012

“That’s My Girlfriend”

Here is my obligatory Valentine’s Day post.

I followed Bill Robinson and Jesse King out to their home on Robinson Road, just outside Athens, Ohio, on a cold, snowy January day in 1969. You’ll be hearing more about what I was doing there and see more photos in the coming weeks. Click on the photos to make them larger.

If there had been a Hoarder’s TV show back then, these old farmer bachelors would have qualified. Not long after I picked my way through a maze of tunnels of debris inside the house, they led me to the kitchen. It was piled high with dirty dishes and food of indeterminate origin.

“Have you ever tried one of these before?

Jesse, who did most of the talking for the duo, reached onto the table, wiped off a fork on his overalls and thrust it into my hand. With the other hand, he pulled a bowl off the table. It contained something that was sort of lumpy. In the dim light, I couldn’t quite pull out what color it was, but it glowed vaguely green.

“Boy,” he said. (Remember he was the talkative one.) “Have you ever tried one of these before?

I could see where this was going and it didn’t look good.

If I said “yes,” I knew he he would say, “Well, I bet you’ve never had any as good as these.”
If I said, “no,” he’d say, “Well, dig in. You won’t find any better than these.” I was a gonner either way.

I looked at the dish and the fork and did a mental calculation: These old goats eat this stuff every day and it hasn’t killed them. “No, Jesse, I haven’t.”

“Well, dig in, You won’t find any better than these,” he said, predictably.

The ghostly apparition

I forked up a small quantity of the unknown dish. Before I could say anything, I noticed a ghostly white form floating into the room. “WOW! This stuff really works fast. I bet I could make a fortune selling this stuff on campus,” I thought.

Jesse turned to the apparition and said, “That’s my girlfriend.”

I never found out the girlfriend’s name nor what the mystery green dish was. (For the curious, it was sort of like a pickle, with a strange gritty crunch that was either some kind of seasoning or, more likely, sand. I didn’t ask for the recipe. There are some things you’re better off not knowing.)

Here’s MY girlfriend

I ran across this frame from a shoot of Grandma Gatewood, an extraordinary woman who, at the age of 67 was the first woman to hike the 2,168-mile Appalachian Trail in one season. When I shot her on the Buckeye Trail near Logan, Ohio, in January of 1969, she was 81 and had done the Appalachian Trail two more times.

The day was beyond miserable. The rain aspired to turn cold enough to become snow; it was so foggy you couldn’t see 100 yards; there was icy snow melt ready to fill your shoes and the trail was a quagmire that would suck your boots off.

When I was editing the film, I was surprised to find two frames of Lila Perry before she became Lila Steinhoff. I hadn’t remembered that she had come along on the assignment. Let me tell you, even someone as dense as I am knew that if you could find a woman who would give you a look like this under those conditions, she was a definite keeper and you shouldn’t let her get away.

We were married in June of 1969.

Valentines past

If you want to see the ones who DID get away, check out my grade school Valentines rescued from Mother’s attic last year.

February 10, 2012July 29, 2015

A Home Dies

I hate fires. Maybe it’s because I’m a pack rat, but I hate to see everything that someone owns go up in smoke and flames. Even if the owners have insurance, the most precious things can’t be replaced.

I’m going to be sneaking away from Southeast Missouri more frequently. The Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum in Altenburg has invited me to speak on the topic of regional photography at a conference this fall, so I’m digging through stuff that I’ve taken outside Missouri. When I publish here, I’ll try to find something to say about it that will still be interesting.

The Reid Fire

The January 6, 1969, front page of The Athens (OH) Messenger contained the fire shot at the top, along with a short news story with the 5Ws and H basics. On what we called The Picture Page, I ran three other photos.

A Home Dies

Sometimes it’s harder to write a short caption that it is a long one. I hate to think of how many times the floor around my desk was covered up with wadded-up carnations of false starts.

This wasn’t one of those nights. When I got back to the office, I slid a piece of copy paper into our battered old manual typewriter and banged out, “The Reids watched their home die last night. A man at the fire said nobody was hurt. He was only partly right. -30-“

I don’t know if that was good journalism, but it was how I felt sitting there smelling of smoke and still shivering from the cold, grateful that I had a house to go home to.

How do you cover a fire?

Hang around a fire station long enough and you’ll hear a firefighter use the term “good fire.” He or she doesn’t mean that they enjoy seeing someone’s home or business burn. What they mean is that “a good fire” is one that tests them and their abilities.

Photographers use the same language. That doesn’t mean that you don’t ache for the people you are photographing; it just means that you have to channel that empathy towards creating an image that will bring that tragedy home to the reader. You exist in a strange gray area where you aren’t a spectator, but you also aren’t a participant. You are the eyes of the community.

I tried to be as unobtrusive as possible. In this case, I shot available light so I wasn’t popping a flash in their faces and I used a medium telephoto lens so I could stay back 15 or 20 feet.

“I was busy trying not to die”

I tried to salve my conscience by telling myself that my photographs might cause the community to rally to the family’s aid. After the fact, I’ve talked with victims of tragedies to see if my presence caused them any distress.

I photographed a highway patrolman being worked on by medics after he had been shot at a traffic stop, then I requested the assignment to cover his recuperation. On our first meeting, I took along a photo of him on the ground. “Did it bother you when I took this photo?” I asked him.

“Actually, I was so busy trying not to die that I didn’t even notice you were there,” he said with a twist of a smile.

A salute to the chimney savers

Small rural fire departments made up mostly or all of volunteers are sometimes called “chimney savers” because that’s often all that’s left at the end. That’s not the fault of these guys who put their lives on the line. By the time the volunteers get to the station, crank up the truck and arrive on the scene, a lot of time has passed. The three and four-minute response times we’re used to in cities might be 15 to 30 minutes in the country. On top of that, it’s unlikely that there will be a fire hydrant nearby. Water has to be relayed from where there is one or a pond or stream has be be drafted for a water supply.

If I got there about the same time as the truck, I’d set my camera aside to help the firefighters pull hose and get set up. Part of that was so they’d be more likely to help me get my story and photos; part of it was because that’s what you do in a small town. I also served as an extra set of eyes for them. Because I wasn’t actively involved in squirting wet stuff on red stuff, I could warn them of power lines, signs of a flashover or a wall or roof that looked like it might collapse.

Photo gallery of a fire

Here’s a selection of photos from that cold January night. It’s been 43 years since I last looked at these pictures. I see things in them today that I didn’t see when I edited the film originally. After I had made my selection of the two family photos that ran in the paper, I tuned out the other frames. I didn’t realize until 2012 the range of emotions I had captured.

I’m glad I’m not chasing sirens anymore. It’s been a long time since I’ve used the phrase “good fire,” too. Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the image to move through the gallery.

January 16, 2012January 16, 2012

Martin Luther King Day

In the spring of 1968, I was photo editor of The Ohio University Post and a photography major. One of my classes – it might have been Magazine and Newspaper Photography – had us form up into teams. We had to pick a geographical area, then document what happened in that area for a week. Classmate Lyntha Scott Eiler was on The Athena, the university yearbook. The publications worked out of the student union building on the Main Green and, since we practically lived there anyway, we picked that as our geographical area. We recruited two more team members and set to work.

The first part of the project was boringly routine: college students playing around with dogs, sunning themselves on the War Memorial, just light-hearted stuff.

A gunshot changed everything

The mood of the campus changed in a heartbeat with a gunshot in Memphis, Tenn. Dr. Martin Luther King was dead.

Memorial service changed to sit-in

My team was lucky enough that our area was where a National Day of Mourning service was going to be held. When it broke up, the crowd moved a block north to the major intersection in town at Court and Union Streets to conduct a sit-in. This wasn’t unusual. That was the traditional spot for the annual Rites of Spring riot and anti-war protests. Cops and students would do a choreographed chicken dance, then everybody would break up and go home. Few arrests were made and teargas wasn’t used until after Kent State.

We could have had a riot

This time, though, a redneck Athens police captain decided he was going to literally throw the demonstrators off of his streets. He didn’t realize how raw emotions were. It was as close to sparking a race riot as Athens has ever come. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and the students were allowed to block the street for a “reasonable” amount of time.

I’ve been afraid for years that we had to turn in our film as part of the project, but I ran across it last week. I’m going to save the bulk of the photos for the anniversary of the National Day of Mourning to give me a chance to track down some of the students so they can tell me what they remember of that day.

I don’t recall what grade we got on the project, but I’m pleased with what I’ve seen so far.

September 23, 2011September 24, 2011

Ohio Halloween Horrors

I saw Halloween decorations and costumes displayed in one of the big box stores tonight. Later, I was moving a bunch of old slides out of Kodak slide trays and putting them into plastic sleeves to save space when I ran across this copy slide of a print. The two events brought a story to mind.

What’s that hanging in the tree?

I was blasting through the rural Southeastern back roads on my way back home right after dusk when, rounding a curve, my headlights picked up something odd on the side of the road. When I got to where the beams lit it up a little better, I slammed on my brakes. It was a body hanging in a tree out in the middle of nowhere.

Murder wasn’t unheard of in that part of the country, but I hadn’t read about any lynchings in our area in decades, so my first thought was a suicide. (All of the murders I had worked were pretty straight-forward; they just got the job done without getting creative.)

I positioned my car to where it lit up the area, then cautiously approached the scene. When I got close enough to get a flashlight on it, it became clear that I had been taken in by a dummy hanging in the tree. I looked around to see if there were any teenagers laughing at the sucker, but there was nobody around.

Only a journalist would have mixed emotions about this: happy because it wasn’t a body; feeling foolish about being suckered in; being disappointed because he didn’t break a story.

The next morning I mentioned my find to some of the guys in the office. “Oh, yeah,” one said. “They’ve got a quaint custom in that area of hanging dummies at Halloween time. If you go back, I bet you find more.”

Indeed, when I went back in the daylight, I found this guy hanging in the middle of downtown Shawnee.

“It’s too grim”

Wife Lila, proofreader when I finish a post before she goes to bed, and general arbitrator of good taste, said, “It’s too grim. I didn’t make any changes, but I didn’t like it.”

So, to lighten the mood, here are some examples of Halloween costumes she inflicted upon the kids over the years.

I’d be lion if I said Matt made a pretty woman

Son Adam, left, went for the full-face mask effect the year Wife Lila did this makeover on Son Matt.

I shouldn’t mock Son Matt too much. Mother managed to make me into such a convincing girl that I won a prize in Mrs. Kelpe’s first grade class because nobody could guess who I was. I was still in costume when we went down to visit my grandmother in Advance. She had a bunch of club women over that afternoon and they were properly impressed with my transformation. Just to set the record straight, I scrawled “I BOY” on a piece of paper and kept showing it to them.

Going to the dogs

Both boys got a crack at the dog costume. This was Matt in 1978.

Matt as firefighter

This might have been the only costume I contributed. Matt swiped my bunker coat, fire helmet and Red Wing boots for this Halloween.