Anyone who knows me knows that I not only have this practice of scanning and fixing up old photos and documents, but that in the course of doing so I have whole conversations with the people in them. When you blow up a picture all the way to a pixel at a time, you notice every little thing. “Oh, that’s the same ashtray from twenty years before, where’d you get that?” “Oh, look that peach dress on another daughter.”
Sometimes I spend hours and megawatts of crowd source energy trying to fathom what’s going on. I’ll send it around to relatives, “Do you know who this is?” I’ve learned to read so much into body language, posture, attire. The mysteries are fascinating. Few are solved.
What remains of my stepfather has been reduced to what will fit in two archive boxes. Everything that seemed important until the end. The dogeared photos, odd notes, clippings, the documents that you keep. Resumes, certificates. Postcards from old friends and family, scraps of paper with phone numbers, small news clippings torn inexplicably from some unknown time and place, for which the importance can no longer be discerned.
Some photos and documents require no effort to understand. Many of these from WWII, where Alvin served with distinction. Awards, honors and certificates. Proud straight pictures of a youth in uniform. The same sort of pictures that probably many families treasure.
I try to put the story behind the papers and pictures,. Organize it into a timeline and geography from common history. Sleuthing out where he was and when, based on cryptic letters to family and coded photographs.
Coded? Yes. Because he served as a recon photographer. He would sit over an open hatch with a mounted camera and be flown low over enemy lines. Trained to take the pictures under all manner of circumstances, then how to decipher them, then encode and relay the information they reveal. Did he know he was putting a red X over human lives who would be blown to smithereens with his guidance? All is fair in love and war. He knew–we all know–he was on the side of right. I know it from inserting myself so intimately into these pictures. As I zoom in to polish a shoe, clip dust lights off sunglasses, I see it in the way they stand together, look at each other. The posture of friends sharing an experience that is hard, but unambiguous. There is a steady, stoic pride in the pictures and in the notes sent home, then later in the ongoing correspondence and article clipping. A whole life defined by that period of time. I think a whole generation of lives were defined.
Because he was a photographer, there are pictures. Not just horrifying pictures that you can imagine him feeling compelled to take through his revulsion. Not just fascinating aerial photos of events I know from textbooks–but also the personal pictures that he and his fellow photographers took of one another. Not often, not many…just a glimpse.
In the beginning you could sense light camaraderie that smacked of summer camp, college fraternities. The joking around doesn’t stop when they are sent into the middle of the action, but the tone changes. When they are goofing around, they are just very young men, finding some joy where they can, even as you begin to see the change in the way they stand, the way they smile.
There is a journal.
I am working to scan it, clean it up and also transcribe it. It’s slow going. In the early pages you can feel his excitement. The adventure, marveling at the historic places visited. Even later, as a certain weariness replaces the enthusiasm, there is a fascination with the details, what ships are around, what the river looks like in different weather. There are also photos he took and sent home with notes on the back that you could believe were from a kid on a school trip. “Lt. Bates is a friend of mine,” it says on the back of a smiling bloke.
There are the war comics books his brother wrote, frail yellowing paper, impossible to save. Later ad campaigns and story illustrations, too. Somewhere in the world there must be more of Jon Blummer’s work.
Some pictures need no caption. Presidents, heroes, prisoners and monsters. Some of them have a significance I would never have realized without seeing the remark on the back. Then there are some where the remark on the back only makes it so much more inexplicable.Like the one that says “Lindbergh.” My aunt and I figure he must be the one seated with his back to the camera-we guessed that because none of the others are him, and because of the way the other men seem to defer to him. See what I mean? You can get lost for hours trying to imagine the moment.
My favorites are not the somber moments of ceremony, nor the brushes with infamy. My favorites are the pictures of young men joking around, getting through it, doing their duty and doing their best, but having a laugh now and then.
I know that Al was never the same after the war. I didn’t know him until he was much older–and I can’t know what he would have been like, but there was a stain of that war on him. Everyone who lived through it was changed by it, whether they stayed or went, whether they lost someone … or that person came home but was still lost in a way, in a time before we had a label for it.
Alvin came back okay, he had a great career, a long marriage, and then a short but glorious one (with my mother,) a lot of friends and a big, close family. He was a smart, kind, handsome man. What trauma remained on him left a stamp of stoic sobriety, a calmness that clung to him in which you could always see a certain gratitude.
He was a good man. I wish I had known him better. I’m grateful that late in life, he and my mother found each other and had a really good last decade together. It feels odd that I am the only one left to cherish his treasures, to document what I can. A large family of many siblings, only one of whom had a child who is also now gone. These couple of boxes are all there is, and I am the only one who can say his name, honor his life. But now I’ve passed it on to you and I hope you will think of him now and then.
