Lila Perry Steinhoff Archives

May 22, 2013

Bill Cosby in Concert

SEMO Classmate, photo buddy and, eventually, best man, Andy McLean introduced me to Bill Cosby. Andy had every Cosby LP every pressed and had memorized every routine until he could do them better than Cosby.

So, when I had a chance to see Cosby in concert at Ohio University in 1969, I snagged two tickets for Fiance Lila and me. We had a front-row seat for his performance in the round (OK, it was in the square, but I didn’t do all that hot in geometry, so I didn’t quibble).

Unusual experience

This was an unusual concert for me. Usually I’m so busy shooting the show from every angle, including the overhead catwalks, that the actual performance is a blur to me. Well, my pictures are sharp, but my memory of what the artist performed is fuzzy. This time, though, I enjoyed the performance as a civilian. I still shot pictures from my seat, but I got to enjoy the show.

Depending on your generation, you may remember Cosby as Fat Albert, Cliff Huxtable or the guy who pitched Jell-O, but he’ll always be Noah to me.

“Come around, Idiot, Come around”

Cosby’s routine about driving a stick shift in San Fransisco resonated with me. See, Athens is said to be built on seven hills, and some of them are ungodly steep. Usually with a stop sign at the top of them.

I had never driven a manual transmission before, but I wanted a Volkswagen Squareback. I bought the car and trusted that Lila could teach me how to drive it. Trust me, if your girlfriend can teach you to drive a stick and still be willing to marry you, then you better snatch her up.

There was one killer hill (with a stop sign) on the way from the house to the office. She taught me the technique of pushing the clutch down with my left foot, putting my right foot on the gas, holding up on the emergency brake with my right hand, and frantically waving my left arm out the window while shouting, like Cosby, “Come around, Idiot, Come around.”

Did he cut it short?

I had a coworker on The OU Post who thought Cosby had cheated the audience by putting on a short show. If it WAS shorter than usual, the audience around me didn’t seem to mind.

Well, maybe Andy could have done it better, but I was pleased with the performance.

Other performances

I was telling someone the other day that I’m embarrassed to have shot a bunch of performances and paid so little attention to them that I don’t know if they were famous or not when I run across the negatives. Here are some I DO remember:

Bill Cosby photo gallery

Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the image to move through the gallery.

May 18, 2013

SEMO Through a Long Lens

Cape was a Honeywell Pentax town. I’m not sure if Nowell’s Camera Shop even sold Nikon. When I left town, I had two or three camera bodies and at least three lenses: a 35mm wideangle, a 50mm normal lens, a 105mm telephoto and (I think) a 200 mm telephoto.

The 105mm magnified about two times and the 200, about four times.

This shot of Academic Hall taken from in front of Kent Library in 1966 or 1967 was probably done with the 200mm. Click on the photos to make them larger.

Closeup of dome

If you couldn’t afford a long lens, you could buy extenders that would effectively increase the length of the lens by two to three times. The tradeoff was that it made the lens a lot slower and there was some degradation in quality. I’m guessing I must have just gotten a 2X extender to make this shot of the dome. It would have converted my 200 into a 400mm lens, which would have magnified about eight times.

This caused some head scratching

This one had me calling in Wife Lila and Neighbor Jacqie for second and third opinions. This is south and west of SEMO. As best as I can figure it out, I must have shot it from one of the hills around Gordonville Road with the extender reaching out into the distance.

Academic Hall is easy to pick out in the middle. The water tower and smokestack to its left are at the university’s power plant north of Academic Hall. The white building at the top left is the Foreign Languages Building. The large building below and to the left of Academic hall is Southeast Hospital.

Jacqie and I thought the building on the left above the Riverside West sign was Central High School, but after looking at the photo more closely, I determined that Central is the dark, multistory building on the far right. That makes the building on the left a mystery. Anybody want to make a guess? Did Notre Dame have that shape?

Academic Hall links

Here are links to earlier stories about Academic Hall.

Academic Hall gets a new hat
Academic Hall in 1966 and 2011
Fred Lynch had a photo of the dome with scaffolding around it
Dome reconstruction starts
Vintage and current SEMO aerials and photos
1966 Outstanding Seniors in front of Academic Hall

May 12, 2013May 12, 2013

Not Enough Words

I usually start with a picture, then wrap some words around it. This time, though, I have an endless supply of pictures and not enough words to express how I feel about Mary Welch Steinhoff. So, on this Mother’s Day, here’s a small sample of Mother with her family.

Every picture I ran across led me to another, and there are scores that I remembered and couldn’t lay my hands on quickly. Mother sure has packed a lot of livin’ into her 91 years.

Mary Welch Steinhoff, my Mother

Click on any photo to make it larger,then click on the sides to move through the gallery.

April 24, 2013October 2, 2024

1964 Jackson Primary

The photos were taken in August 1964 in the Cape County Courthouse in Jackson. The sleeve says “Jackson Primary,” so the workers must have been counting ballots while the candidates chewed their fingernails. I would have been working at The Jackson Pioneer at the time. In the background are name plates that seem to read Rada Lou Kamp, Rusby C. Crites and Marie H. Bradford when I blew them up.

Covering elections fun, frustrating

Covering election night could produce some good images, unfortunately, the best pictures often didn’t run because they were of minor candidates or of relatively insignificant races. Photographers would be frustrated because they wasted a lot of time and editors were frustrated because they didn’t have key photos.

We finally came to a compromise at The Palm Beach Post. We would determine in advance what races we wanted to focus on, then reporters were responsible for finding out where the candidates were likely to be when the results came in. (The good old days when everybody gathered at election central had given away to elaborate parties.)

I played air traffic controller

Each photographer was given a master list of candidates he or she was responsible for covering, along with the size and shape of the photo that had been laid out in advance. (We could make a limited number of changes on the fly, but tight deadlines meant we had to stay to the script most of the time.)

I coordinated moving the shooters from place to place based on results that were being relayed to me from the newsroom. I also arranged for film to be picked up so the photographers wouldn’t have to come back to the office. We’d have been lost without two-way radios. I handled the logistics of getting the photos taken. Chief Photographer John Lopinot edited the film and saw that the pictures got in the paper. It wasn’t unusual that I would realize that I had juggled bodies all evening without seeing the results until the paper came off the press.

Wife Lila key player

Wife Lila was a staff favorite because she’d brew up a huge pot of her special chili to fuel the staff before they headed out to chase candidates. We joked that it was not only filling, but that about two hours into the evening, it would produce gas that would keep the TV crews from getting too close to you.