Ohio Archives

February 5, 2015

Superintendent McClaskey

On September 19, 1968, I ran this photo and the following copy on an Athens Messenger Picture Page: Night Superintendent C.H. McClaskey is not-so-quietly changing the face of Southeastern Ohio while most of us are asleep. Tomorrow (that’s a sneaky way of letting you know that I’m running a two-fer) you’ll see how he and his crew manage to move 15,000 cubic yards of dirt a night at the Highway 33 construction site near Logan.

Maybe it’s because I grew up around construction, but I’ve always liked and felt comfortable around solid men like Superintendent McClaskey. I sense that you would NOT want to get on his bad side. Still, he and his crew seemed to have a good rapport.

Thirsty Dragons Prowl at Night

As promised, the next day’s layout showed night photos of the lights of the heavy-duty scrapers moving dirt from one place to another. I haven’t scanned that film, but I do have a few shots of the workmen. Click on any photo to make it larger, then use your arrow keys to move through the gallery.

The copy, under the headline, “Thirsty Dragons Prowl at Night,” read, Long before you get close to McClaskey’s giants, you can hear their deep-throated roars and see pairs of eyes cutting through the night. The rubber-tired dragons are thirsty beasts, gulping up over 38,000 gallons of fuel a week moving dirt for a new Highway 33.

It was nice of the executive vice president of the A.J. Baltes construction company to send me a letter after the pieces ran.

February 2, 2015

1968 Anti-War Protest

I’m working on an exhibit of photos dealing with the turbulent 60s and 70s at Ohio University. Given the choice between posting random photos as I’m editing them or letting the site go dark from time to time, I’ll opt for posting pictures with minimal copy.

The negative sleeve says February 22, 1968, so I must have shot them for The OU Post.

Must have been cold

It’s Ohio. It’s February, and people are wearing coats, scarves and gloves. That’s a pretty good indication it was being held outside where it was cold.

Must have been one of first

I transferred from SEMO to Ohio University as a junior in the fall of 1967, so this must have been one of the first of many protests and demonstrations I would cover over the next two years.

These three are a mixture of genders and ages. They’re dressed downright preppie, too. They don’t quite fit the image of commie pinko hippies. A lot of the photos from this post will be in the show.

January 30, 2015

Department of “Why Bother?”

I didn’t pay much attention to this building when I was northbound through Glouster to the Burr Oak Lodge where I was staying the last time I was in Athens, Ohio, but I did a double take on the way south. (Glouster is the place where I shot the epitome of a small-town football game last fall.)

That is one skinny building

I had to stop to make sure it wasn’t an optical illusion.

No, it really WAS that skinny. It got bigger at the other end, but I could easily span the back wall without having to stretch my arms out as big as I had gestured before to describe the size of a fish that got away. (Click on the photos to make them larger.)

Only eight bricks wide

That wall was only eight bricks wide. If a standard brick is eight inches long, and you figure the space for the mortar between the bricks is half an inch or less, that would be, let’s see 8″ x 8 bricks x 7 mortar rows @ 1/2 inch equals just 67.5 inches or a little more than 5-1/2 feet wide. Allowing for the thickness of the walls, the open space inside the thin end would have had to have been less than four feet.

Why would anybody use that many bricks, not to count the labor of laying them, for such a small return of space?

I don’t know the answer to that question, but my guess is that both bricks and labor were cheap in Glouster when that building was constructed.

Bricks were a big deal

Here’s a really good history of the region that explains how important the iron, coal and brick industries were.

Curator Jessica is somewhat of a brick expert, so she’s always looking for SE Ohio bricks like this Hocking brick she spotted when we were walking around the Ray Charles Plaza in Albany, Ga.

January 18, 2015

MLK by Yousuf Karsh

I photographed this young man looking at a portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the display window of Lamborn’s Studio in Athens, Ohio, on April 9, 1968, five days after the Civil Rights leader was gunned down in Memphis.

It wasn’t until this evening that I blew it up big enough to read the inscription on the left. The photo was taken by famed photographer Yousuf Karsh. Estrellita Karsh donated the portrait to the National Portrait Gallery in his memory.

Click on the photo to make it larger.

How the photo was taken

From the photo caption:

A man constantly on the move, Martin Luther King was most often photographed in action by those covering the events of the civil-rights movement. This likeness by renowned portraitist Yousuf Karsh is a different kind of image—a formal portrait that utilizes pose and lighting rather than environment to identify King as a leader and a visionary. Karsh made the photograph in August 1962, when King returned to Atlanta following the prolonged and dispiriting struggle for desegregation in Albany, Georgia. With very little time to work, Karsh photographed his subject in the only space available—a corner of King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. Recalling the circumstances of that sitting, Karsh noted, “Nowhere could [King] relax when constantly beset by friends and aides wishing him well, commiserating on his difficulties, congratulating him on his return, and planning new strategy.”

Category: Ohio