The temptation, after we repainted the small cocoon-like sitting room, was not to rehang the photographs that previously covered all four walls. With a sloped ceiling, a couch, a few small side tables and a compact window it was cozy the way it was. But there was no question the photos were returning. My father had decorated the room with them before I was born and it was perhaps the house’s most distinctive.
These weren’t family photos, though there were a few of those. Most of them were either pictures of him, the famous with whom his life intersected; mostly during the 1940’s and 1950’s when he worked for the New York Times. A few are portraits but others show him shaking hands with the great and near great.
They included an autographed photo of Albert Einstein, with whom my dad was improbably invited to play chess as a child when the great physicist visited a mutual friend at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. My father and his parents lived there during the 1930’s. Helen Keller appears in another autographed photo and Carl Sandburg in a third. There are also images of my father at summer camp in Maine, in the army, and behind a microphone in later life when he hosted a radio author interview show.
After he died in 2005 and especially since I inherited the house a couple of years ago I’ve blasphemously started to add photos of other family members, including my mother and her side of the family. But I’ve been sensitive not to tip the balance. The room serves as a self-styled shrine to my father but also to an era. To enter it feels like stepping back in time when life seemed to occur exclusively in black and white.
One of the more recent photos I was thinking of including was taken of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Mayor Ed Koch and me at Ed’s 88th birthday reception at Gracie Mansion in 2012. But my wife reminded me that the photo was in color. It would have disturbed the room’s Zen, felt jarring beside my father’s army photos or those of him manning the phones at the night photo desk at the Times.
As much as I hated to hammer nails into the freshly painted walls, I realized that doing so was a sign of respect. I’d taken photographs of every wall before the pictures were removed so they could be restored to their rightful places. My father had an artistic touch so I’ve deferred to his judgment, down to the spacing.
The images aren’t sacrosanct, not all of them anyway. My plan is to archive some of them – in other words box them in the basement – to make room for new stuff. I don’t know whether I’ll have the nerve, but I’m considering devoting one entire wall to family members other than my father. I don’t think he’d object. He tended to be rather fatalistic. He left little doubt he believed that once you’re gone you’re gone.
Also, he left my brother the Einstein and Helen Keller photos. After they were removed it was as if the integrity of the space was subtly subverted. That provided the license I needed to introduce new photos. One of them was a well-known image of Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier playfully butting heads during the weigh-in at 1971’s “Fight of the Century.” It was a gift to me from George Kalinsky, Madison Square Garden’s official photographer.
Another is an office photo of me when I served as the New York City Department of Correction’s assistant director of Public Affairs in the late Seventies. The weapon I’m brandishing, a la Dirty Harry, was borrowed. The gold shield was assigned.
The challenge is knowing which photos can go without destroying the soul of the place. Some are a close call. For example, an autographed drawing of the comic strip character The Sad Sack by his creator, George Baker. It’s fading but might benefit being rehung closer to a light source.
Then there are numerous autographed photos of statesmen, some more minor than others that I don’t recognize and whose signatures are indecipherable. Sadly, my father isn’t around to identify them and I doubt anybody else can. Should those stay or go?
I’ve even added a “new” photo or two of my dad that I unearthed while going through his stuff. One shows him in his World War II corporal uniform, barely out of his teens. He’s sitting in an audience listening to a swing band at what I assume was an army base.
Another captures him middle-aged in summer shorts and sandals preparing to toss a metal ball during a spirited game of pétanque, the French equivalent of bocce. It was shot at a Swiss resort during the 1970’s.
Nothing science has discovered, at least so far, can return the dead to life. Nor would they necessarily want to. A photograph is the next best thing. Eighty-eight of them -- I just counted them for the first time -- is even better.
Ralph Gardner, Jr. is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found at ralphgardner.com
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