Ken Steinhoff Archives

March 21, 2013October 27, 2021

Ohio University Post

There’s a big Ohio University Post reunion in Athens, Ohio, this weekend.

I was photo editor of the paper from the fall of 1967 through the summer of 1968, when I went to work for The Athens Messenger. I won’t make it back for the reunion, but I put together these layouts of some of the student newspaper staffers from 1968 – 1970 to display at the Athens County Historical Society Museum. For you folks who ARE in Athens, here’s a sample of what you’ll see. Curator Jessica Cyders said the museum, at 65 North Court Street, will be open Saturday morning from 10 a.m. until noon, so you can slip in before the formal reunion activities begin.

The museum will also have photos I took during the Martin Luther King National Day of Mourning on April 8, 1968. Some staffers like Tom Price, Clarence Page, Lew Stamp and others appear in the pictures.

And, finally, you can see protest photos I shot from 1967 through the close of the school on May 15, 1970. Rudy Maxa and others show up in them.

Photo Gallery of OU Post Staffers

The museum will have prints of these for sale. The prints are suitable for framing. I don’t know if that means you can frame the pictures or frame the people IN the pictures. Click on any image to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the picture to move through the gallery.

March 10, 2013March 10, 2013

On the Road to Florida

I had to pull out of Cape on March 4 in order to make it back to West Palm Beach by March 6. As usual, I got a late start. No departure would be complete without taking a final photo before backing out of the driveway.

I think I’m getting better at these photos. Either my arm is getting longer or Mother and I are shrinking in our old age, which makes it possible to get us both in the photo.

Headed across the bridge

This is an appropriate bookend to the trip. I posted a photo when Friend Jan made me turn around to get the bridge and the moon in a picture the night we pulled into Cape.

Atlanta skyline and traffic (what else?)

I left Cape in snow flurries, and woke up in Manchester, Tenn., to rain. By the time I got to Monteagle Pass, the rain had turned into a monsoon and the winds were threatening to blow me across two lanes of traffic. It was hard enough to stay on the road in my Odyssey van. I don’t know how an empty 18-wheeler could have handled it.

I hoped to get an Oink Moo Burger at Dave’s Modern Tavern, but it wasn’t open. A woman in a nearby business recommended an Italian joint just down the road. Their pizza was excellent. Just as I was switching from my eating glasses to my seeing glasses to pay the bill, the left side of the frame came apart and dropped my lens on the carpet. Fortunately, there was a CVS drugstore next door where I could buy a replacement screw. A helpful women at the checkout counter put the screw back in for me since I couldn’t see to do it.

All of this piddling around put me into Atlanta at rush hour. I hadn’t planned to take another photo of a traffic jam in my favorite city, but we were stopped and the skyline was interesting. I think all the cold weather may have caused the lube in the camera mirror mechanism to stiffen up. I had a few frames with dark tops a couple of days ago, and the gremlin struck again here. While I wouldn’t mind some kind of out-of-this-world General Sherman coming down to devour Atlanta, that was simply not happening here.

Crawfish at Bubba Jax

I get odd cravings on the road. For some reason, I had a hankering for Dairy Queen’s chicken strips with white gravy and a Blizzard for desert. A sign promised at DQ in Valdosta, but I couldn’t spot it. As luck would have it, I opted to make a U-turn into Bubba Jax Crab Shack. It was a nondescript kind of place, but there was a fair number of cars in the lot, so I decided to take a chance. A chalkboard at the entrance said they had a special on crayfish.

I love Cajun forms of crawfish, so I placed an order without asking how they were served. While waiting for my order to arrive, I saw plate after plate of lightly battered fried oysters and onion rings walk by. I was wondering if I had made a mistake.

When the server placed a bunch of red shells in front of me, I was sure I had. “This is embarrassing,” I confessed. “I’ve shucked oysters, peeled shrimp and cracked crabs, but I’ve never tackled crawdads before. How do I attack these beasts?”

She said, “I’m not exactly sure. I know you eat the tails and some folks suck out the insides from the top, but they’re not exactly my thing.”

When she came back, I suggested that she put these on the menu as the Dieter’s Special “because you burn more calories peeling them you gain in consuming the critters.” I got better and faster, but I sure wish I had ordered the oysters. I’m going to put crayfish on the list of things like crunchy rock shrimp I’m going to avoid as being too much work.

Lunch with the grandsons

While I was out of town, Grandson Graham turned 2, and Elliot was added to the family on February 4. Parents Adam and Carly asked if I wanted to meet them for lunch at a hamburger joint on March 7. Are you kidding? This was my first glimpse of Elliot. I’d have shot more photos except that he was sound asleep. I learned with Graham that you do NOT want to have a screaming awake baby on your hands. I had forgotten they don’t come with a mute switch.

Graham’s a big boy now

There’s nothing like having a newborn in the family to make a two-year-old look like a big boy. It’s incredible how much more he’s talking than when I last saw him about six weeks ago. Grandson Malcolm, who is eight, is almost as tall as his grandmother, and looks like he’s going to be asking for the car keys in another week or two.

Graham, even after getting a spit-shine from his mother, is still wearing a significant portion of his lunch. (You can, as always, click on the photos to make them larger.)

February 27, 2013March 29, 2021

Dawn of Mourning Exhibit in Athens

I was back in Athens, Ohio, on February 26, walking on rain-slicked cobblestones and helping set up my exhibit of photos of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Day of Mourning taken in 1968.

“Dawn of Mourning” is presented by Sigma Gamma Rho, Inc. in conjunction with the College of Arts and Sciences, the Athens Historical Society and Museum, the Foster and Helen Cornwell Lecture Series, University College, the Campus Involvement Center, The Athens Messenger and The Post.

Here is a radio interview the local NPR station, WOUB, did with me. (To be honest, I could only listen to about five minutes of it. I always cringe when I hear myself being interviewed.

Danielle Echols, who has been the Sigma Gamma Rho coordinator on the project, did a great job of keeping me more or less between the lines during the radio program. I could tell she had a basket of questions to ask if I was one of those laconic “Yes, Ma’am,” “No, Ma’am” subjects, but she need not have worried. Rambling is one of my better things.

Photo gallery of show catalog photos.

Here is a catalog of the key images showing a highly emotional day at Ohio University. Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the image to move through the gallery.

February 14, 2013February 17, 2013

Another Valentine’s Day

When I was living in Cape, I was a sucker for whatever new toy Nowell’s Camera would get in. I thought this half-frame camera was kind of neat. It was called a half-frame because it took two photos on a normal 35-mm frame of film.

The good news is that you got twice as many photos per roll as a normal 35mm camera; the bad news is that you also got half the quality. Because of that, I hardly ever used it. If I was going to shoot something I cared about, I’d just as soon use a “real” camera.

Still, it was good for goofing around with. Based on other photos taken when my muttonchops were in that state of growth, I’d say this picnic was about 1970ish. It was chilly enough that I was wearing an old corduroy jacket I picked up at a charity sale held every year when the students left stuff behind in the dorms. It wasn’t all that warm, but I wore it everywhere.

Wife Lila is cute as bug

She’s warm enough in her sweater that she can leave her jacket open. Click on the photos to make them larger.

Fishing for fun, not food

Buddy, boss and fellow Athens Messenger photographer Bob Rogers lived out in the country (you didn’t have to go very far out of Athens proper to be in the country) in a house with a pond in the back. I’d keep my fishing equipment on his porch and sneak off on a slow day to see if anything was biting. I’d park close enough to the pond to hear the police calls on my scanner so I could pretend to be working. If I got lucky, I’d leave the string in the water and a note telling Bob he was having fish for supper. This looks too big to have been Bob’s pond.

I’m wearing a pair of “fur”-like lined boots that I probably bought for all of about $12. I doubt that any sheep or other animals were harmed in the making of the footwear lining. They WERE warm and relatively waterproof. I wore them until the smell was so bad that flowers would wilt when I walked by. Plastic flowers.

How do you recycle something like that? Easy, I gave them to Brother David, who wore them for who knows how many years out in Oklahoma. If I ever read some scientific study that attributes Oklahomans’ lack of smell sensitivity to some kind of genetic anomaly, I’m going to have to speak up and tell ’em about David and my boots.

Beagle bait

If there’s a beagle anywhere within miles of Wife Lila, they’ll make a beeline for her.

Don’t know what we had

I tried to blow up the picture to see what we had on our picnic, but I couldn’t make out much. It looks like we had a glass bottle containing some kind of soft drink. I suspect that the beagle wound up with as much of our lunch as we did.

Best of cars, worst of cars

I bought this 1969 Volkswagen Squareback before I even tried to drive a stick shift. Lila had the task of teaching me how to shift gears on Athens’ steep hills. It was a long time before I could get away from having to keep one hand on the wheel and one hand on the emergency brake when I got stopped at the top of a hill. I learned very quickly where Bill Cosby’s “Go Around, Idiot, Go Around” bit came from.

It was a lemon from the time I drove it brand-new off the dealer’s lot and had it run out of gas two blocks away. We took it on a trip to Mexico. Not far out of Athens, I started smelling gas. Stopped at a service station where I was told the gas line had come loose in the back of the car (where the engine lived). Got down the road a bit and smelled gas again. The gas line was pulled loose from the tank (which was in the front of the car). Somebody had skimped on the amount of hose they had installed.

Air-cooled engine wasn’t

One night coming back from Columbus, we stopped for one of the red lights in Logan. The tiny town might not have had much, but it had lots of traffic lights, all synched to make you stop for each one. Apparently the brakes had been adjusted too tightly and were dragging. So long as I was cranking at highway speeds, the wheels would turn. When I slowed down for the light, they locked up solid. We had to wait by the side of the road for about an hour until they cooled down enough to release.

The biggest and baddest defect was that the air louvers that were designed to blow air back through the air-cooled engine were installed backward, causing them to suck instead of blow. I ended up selling the car with the engine disassembled and dwelling in a cardboard box.

It was a fun car to drive, though, and it was a nice small stationwagon-type vehicle. Too bad it was mechanically unsound and poorly put together. I’ll never forget those VW heaters. They depending on engine revs to blow the hot air. If you were in fourth to make time, your engine was turning over too slowly to produce heat. If you dropped down to third for heat, then you were over-revving the engine. You had to accept the fact that your carpet would turn to ice in about November and stay frozen until after the spring thaw.

A Valentine’s Day apart

I’m in Missouri and she’s in Florida for this Valentine’s Day. That doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about her. In my mind, she’s still the pig-tailed girl on the picnic. Then I look in the mirror and think, “What’s that cute thing doing hanging out with an old coot?”