Bob Rogers Archives

March 23, 2012May 3, 2021

Dick Gregory for President

With all of the controversy about whether or not Cape Girardeau’s Rush Limbaugh should be in the Hall of Famous Missourians, I stumbled across a Show Me state resident who deserves a nomination – Dick Gregory. I was looking for something else the other day and stumbled across these photos of Gregory speaking at Ohio University in 1968.

I was surprised to find that (a) he was from St. Louis and went to school at Southern Illinois University and (b) he was still alive.

The Black Mort Sahl

The biography on his website says that he was African American comedian and civil rights activist whose social satire changed the way white Americans perceived African American comedians.

He was part of a new generation of black comedians that includes Nipsey Russell, Bill Cosby and Godfrey Cambridge. They broke with the minstrel tradition, which portrayed blacks as stereotypes.

Gregory, who had a dry, satirical wit, came to be known as the “Black Mort Sahl.” (Friends of Gregory would refer to Sahl as “the White Dick Gregory.” I was fortunate to cover Bill Cosby when he played Ohio University at about the same time.

“Nigger” was best-seller

I bought his autobiography, Nigger, when it was published in 1963 (when it was on its way to becoming the number one best-seller in the country), but I never felt comfortable walking around with the cover showing, even though he explained in his forward that he had written a note to his mother saying, “Whenever you hear the word ‘Nigger,’ you’ll know they’re advertising my book.”

Routine impressed Hugh Hefner

He got one his earliest breaks when Hugh Hefner heard him perform this routine in front of a mostly white audience when he had been brought in as a last-minute replacement:

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. I understand there are a good many Southerners in the room tonight. I know the South very well. I spent twenty years there one night.

Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant and this white waitress came up to me and said, “We don’t serve colored people here.” I said, “That’s all right. I don’t eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.”

Then these three white boys came up to me and said, “Boy, we’re giving you fair warning. Anything you do to that chicken, we’re gonna do to you”. So I put down my knife and fork, I picked up that chicken and I kissed it. Then I said, “Line up, boys!”

His temporary gig at the Chicago Playboy Club lasted three years.

Gregory changed my career

I was covering the event for The Ohio University Post. Much to my surprise, I got a call from The Athens Messenger, the local paper, asking if they could run my photo taken of Gregory while he waiting to go on. It was a surprise because I had seen photographer Bob Rogers at the press conference earlier that day, and I assumed that he must have covered the speech as well.

See, newspapers HATE to pick up something from a competitor. Now, The Post was the university student newspaper and The Messenger was the “real” paper, so we weren’t exactly competitors, but I always looked to see how I had stacked up against Bob or Jon Webb when we had been at the same event.

I was flattered that they wanted the art, so I offered it up quickly. I think that’s probably what led to them offering me an internship that summer. When they couldn’t find anyone who would work as long, hard (and cheap) as I would, it turned into a full-time job. When Bob moved on, I became chief photographer.

Write-in Candidate for President

Gregory ran for president in 1968 as a candidate of the Freedom and Peace Party, a splinter group of the Peace and Freedom Party. His button reads, “Write in Dick Gregory President for Peace in ’68.”

I guess I can add him to the list of presidents and presidential candidates I’ve covered.

Standing ovation

Gregory’s speech was well-received by the mostly white audience. Even though I was busy shooting the event from a multitude of positions, I heard enough to be impressed by the way he managed to get his point across without stabbing anyone with it.

I think he opened some eyes that evening. Most of us hadn’t heard that perspective before.

This site has an interesting collection of Dick Gregory quotes. In some he’s funny; in others he’s ironically angry; in others, he’s thought-provoking.

Interesting body language

I didn’t notice it when I edited the film in 1968, but take a look at the photo gallery. There’s an interesting contrast in body language between the white students and the black students at the afternoon press conference.

I see a lot of crossed arms and furrowed brows. I’m not sure the black students were as receptive to Gregory’s message as the white students.

Dick Gregory Photo gallery

I included a bunch of press conference photos in the gallery to show some of the folks I worked with in those days: Bob Rogers, Tom Price, Ed Pieratt and some radio and TV guys who look familiar (but we print guys didn’t bother pay much attention to them). Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side to move through the gallery.

February 18, 2012December 20, 2021

Turtles, Frogs, Dogs and Desperation

A question that comes up from time to time is where do you find inspiration and story ideas?

The short answer “desperation.”

There was this big monster in the pressroom that had to be fed every day. I thought I had put The Monster behind me, but I’m filing more stories doing this blog than when I working for newspapers. When you’re doing feature-type stories, you can’t rely on plane crashes, fires and floods to bail you out. You have to dig up topics out of the thin air. Here’s an example of how ideas pinball all over the place, and rarely in a straight line.

I was looking at some random negatives from Cape when this turtle caught my eye. This was a Steinhoff pet from back in the days when we were made of tougher stock. We didn’t know then that the tiny turtles, available in plastic bags at the SEMO Fair or in every pet store, were death on the half shell. Don’t believe me? Check out this FDA warning about Salmonella-bearing tiny turtles. (Click on any photo to make it larger. Don’t forget to wash your hands if you touch the turtle.)

But, like they say in the infomercials, there’s more. A turtle made me think of a frog.

Pomeroy Frog Jumping Contest

Athens (OH) Messenger photo partner Bob Rogers and I would make contact sheets of our film, cut out the frames we thought would make a photo essay, push them around on a layout sheet until they looked right, size them to fit and make the final prints. The “winners” would be taped to the layout sheet to guide the composing room in making up the page. The “losers” would either get tossed in a box or, if we thought they might fit into a future layout, they’d get tacked on the wall.

After I covered the Pomeroy Frog Jumping contest toward the end of June, 1968, I had one photo that made it on the Wall of Desperation. It languished there until October 1. The well was dry. Some days you just can’t find anything worth shooting. I reached up on the wall, ran the photo 8-1/8 inches wide and 12-3/8 inches deep with this cringe-inducing caption:

“Frost is just a frog’s hop away, so don’t let winter get the jump on you. Don’t let being bottled up until spring jar you, though; about the time it seems a long time coming, warm weather will spring out.”

Bob, my nominal boss, didn’t give me any grief. He’d been there himself.

October 2, the day it ran, seemed to be a good day to stay out of the office. The publisher gave us a lot of latitude, but I didn’t want to discover his outer limits.

Another dry day

There’s a reason why I bring up the frog, as much as I’d like to forget it.

I was having another one of those dry days. Nothing was clicking. I shot a sequence of a boy trying to make it home on his bike with a loaf of bread under his arm, but the situation was so weak I didn’t even bother to get out of the car to get the kid’s name.

Mrs. Nellie Vess

The shadows were getting longer and longer and the day was getting shorter and shorter. This time I didn’t even have the frog on the wall to plug the hole. I made a turn down a dusty gravel road near Trimble. That’s east of Nelsonville and south of Glouster. If you don’t know where those towns are, don’t look for Trimble.

I spotted Mrs. Nellie Vess, a couple of kids and a puppy on the porch of a modest frame house with asphalt shingle siding. The home had seen better days, but it was still neat and clean.

After introducing myself and chatting for a few minutes, Mrs. Vess invited me in for a cold glass of water. I normally don’t accept things when I’m on an assignment and I really wasn’t thirsty, but turning down the water would have hurt her feelings. I followed her through her well-kept house to the kitchen.

Taped up on the refrigerator was The Frog. “I just love that picture,” she said.

“Lonely no more”

“Lonely No More” was the headline I put on the page. My caption was sparse: Mrs. Nellie Vess was lonely. Not many people passed by her home in Trimble and those who did seldom stopped in to chat. That was before last week when Patty Sue – part beagle and part question mark – moved in. “Now I’ve got lots of company,” she says. One of her frequent visitors is Rhonda Kay Judson, 5.

Stories should have a happy ending

Don’t you just love heart-warming stories with happy endings? It’s too bad that too many don’t turn out that way.

A few months after the story ran, my travels took me down that gravel road near Trimble. Mrs. Vess was sitting by herself on the porch. There was no Patty Sue. There were no neighbor kids. Mrs. Vess told me that she had to go into the hospital for a brief stay and she had to give Patty Sue away. She was lonely again.

I’d like to tell you that I stopped by to see Mrs. Vess to keep her company from time to time, but I’d be fibbing. I never saw her again. I was just starting to learn that getting emotionally involved with everyone I photographed would soon empty my empathy pot and lead to burnout or worse. I could empathize with my subjects long enough to capture their souls, but then I had to cut them loose.

I turned down her offer of a cold glass of water on the last visit. And, I didn’t look in the rearview mirror when I drove away down that dusty gravel road.

February 3, 2012

Missouri Highway Patrol

I’d rather see these Missouri Highway Patrol troopers here than in my rearview mirror with their red lights spinning. The negative sleeve is dated January 5, 1967, but I didn’t see it in the paper around that date. I thought it might have been taken for the 1967 Achievement Edition and, in fact, there was a story about the Troop E in the February 21 paper. These aren’t the photos that ran with the story, though.

At some time or another, I ran into just about every trooper that worked the counties around Cape, but these guys don’t look familiar. The trooper I knew best was Norman Copeland. He should have been a recruiting poster for what a Highway Patrolman should look like.

How NOT to shoot a photo

This is not how to shoot a photo of a bunch of people. I violated the newspaper rule of thumb that a person’s head should be at least the size of a nickle in the print. The subjects are way too small.

My fashion faux pas

I should have remembered that lesson when I moved to Ohio.

The society editor at The Athens Messenger went to a lot of trouble to round up some college girls to model some clothes for a fashion shoot. I don’t like to set up pictures and my idea of fashion is blue jeans and Red Wing boots, so I probably should have handed the assignment off to Bob Rogers, the other photographer. Still, I loaded the gals into my car and we headed off to a state park where we had a great afternoon shooting all kinds of artsy stuff.

The next morning, I dropped off the prints and waited for the praise for a job well done. Marge Straight, the soc editor, looked at them and, in her usual quiet, diplomatic way, said, “Ken these are very nice, but the idea of a fashion shoot is to show the clothes.” Luckily the models were amenable to another day frolicking in the woods.

I used to tell my staff that I’d never ask them to shoot an assignment that I hadn’t shot or wouldn’t be willing to shoot. I lied. I dodged every opportunity to go to New York for the annual fashion shoots.