Fred Lynch Archives

July 13, 2013July 13, 2013

Murtaugh Park Expansion

As many of you have figured out, I’m in Cape for a few weeks. When I’m here, I drive around like crazy trying to bag as much new material as possible to dole out when I return home to Florida.

From time to time, I have even managed to scoop The Missourian. (Of course, as I point out to bike riders who brag about overtaking another rider, “It’s only a race if the other guy knows it.)

I thought I might have a chance of catching Photo Buddy Fred Lynch asleep this afternoon when I drove past what I’ve dubbed the Historical Triangle.

Have catskinners become deere slayers?

There was a artist on a bulldozer who we’d have called a “catskinner” in the days when yellow Caterpillar equipment was ubiquitous on job sites. I’ve seen enough dirt pushed around to judge he knew what he was doing.

Since he’s on a Deere dozer, I guess that would make him a “deere slayer,” but that doesn’t have the same ring. The sign in the foreground proclaims the narrow strip of grass to be Murtaugh Park. The Red House is in the background.

Drat! James Baughn beat me

Right there in front of me was a flurry of dump trucks, jackhammers, front end loaders and guys leaning on shovels. All I had to do now was to figure out what was going on.

Drat! Missourian webmaster James Baughn, who with Fred and Sharon Sanders, are must-read Missourian bloggers, beat me to the story. He deserves the traffic, so get the full story from Baughn. (If you REALLY want to be distracted, go to his Bridgehunter website. There’s nowhere else like it to find interesting factoids about bridges.)

The short version is that making Main Street open to two-way traffic made Aquamsi Street redundant between William and Merriwether Streets. The workers were ripping up Aquamsi so grass could replace asphalt, resulting in Murtaugh Park nearly doubling in size. (Of course, that will last until the City Fathers and Mothers decide to make Main one-way again in a few years.)

I stumbled across another story that is right up Baughn’s alley. I hope he reads it here before I see it appear in his blog.

Stories about Murtaugh Park

June 11, 2013

Harris Motor Car Co Fire

The Harris Motor Company fire at the northeast corner of Broadway and Lorimier wasn’t all that exciting, but it did capture some interesting things in the background of a couple of shots.

I don’t know that I was ever in the building, but Fred Lynch and Sharon Sanders did a pretty good job of nailing down the history of the landmark building in Fred’s blog.

Idan-Ha Hotel sign

You can see the Idan-Ha Hotel sign off in the distance on the left. The N’Orleans sign shows up behind one for the State of Missouri Employment Service. The Idan-Ha burned in 1989, and the N’Orleans is sitting empty today.

Built in 1915

Fred’s blog said the building was constructed in 1915. In 1937, Harris Motor Car Co. razed the adjoining Dr. Adolph List house, built in 1888, to expand its operation. Another story noted that the List house was modeled after a German castle.

Turned into apartments in 2001

I couldn’t find a story about the fire, but there was an ad in the Dec. 3, 1965, Missourian saying to watch for the Grand Opening of Harris Motor Car Co. The 1968 City Directory listed Harris Motor Car Co. at Highway 61 North and Independence.

In 1968, Charmin, which was building its new plant near Neely’s Landing, leased space in the “former Harris Motor Car Building.” In 1971 the paper reported that the building had been converted into an apartment complex by Vernon Rhodes.

May 6, 2013May 6, 2013

Traffic Bridge at Night

There’s something magic about shooting after dark. The light bounces around in ways it doesn’t during the daylight hours. There must have been some low clouds the night I shot these time exposures because the sky reflected a lot of the city’s lights.

When you were driving across the bridge, you probably didn’t notice there was a little bit of a curve to it. I shot this photo the same night as this one.

There’s a lot of steel here

You can see why it was a challenge to demolish the bridge. In one of those strange coincidences, I was scanning these photos on the same day Fred Lynch’s blog carried photos of the 1957 bridge-freeing queens.

St. Vincent’s steeple

You can see St. Vincent’s steeple just barely peeking up at the bottom right of this shot. The exposure was long enough that the tree branches are blurry, but too short for the car headlights to streak all the way across the bridge. (You can click on the photos to make them larger.)

March 29, 2013February 17, 2016

4 Shots of One-Shot Frony

I’m sure G.D. Fronabarger – better known to everyone in Southeast Missouri as One-Shot Frony – must have thought, “That kid’s crazy wasting four shots on a Kiwanis Club presentation.” (I took four, but only three were different enough to show here.)

Frony, who was the Missourian’s photographer from 1929 to 1986, was best known for lining up a group of people, then growling around his ever-present cigar, “Don’t blink. I’m taking one picture.” True to his word, he’d press the shutter release, then walk away.

The negative sleeve is slugged Kiwanis Club – Frony 07-20-1967. That’s in one of those months that is a black hole in the Google Archives, so I don’t know what’s happening in the photo.

Gary Rust was there

Gary Rust, who would become a newspaper magnate a few years down the road, was one of the three men being recognized with Frony. He’s on the left in the photo at the top of the page and on the right in this photo. I don’t know who the man in the middle was. Note Frony’s cigar. I don’t know if he ever smoked it or if he just chewed it to death. I tried to blow up the name tag on the man at the lectern, but “Wayne” was all I could make out.

Fred Lynch keeps him alive

Fred Lynch, who has been a photographer at The Missourian since 1975, keeps Frony’s photos alive in his blog, f/8 and Be There. Some of his early work goes well beyond straight newspaper photography and approaches art as much as anything can that is destined to have a life of 24 hours.

By the time I got to know Frony, he was burned out from shooting 59 years worth of those Kiwanis Club meetings and the same annual events that had come around 59 times. I wrote about Frony in 2009 and published my favorite picture of him.

In it, I talked about how surprised I was to hear Frony defend a controversial spot news photo I had taken and how our relationship changed after that. We were never close, but I had the feeling that Frony finally conceded that “this kid might just make it as a news photographer.”