Steve Folsom Archives

March 1, 2015November 7, 2016

Battle of the Angels

I’ve been going through a box of old and fading photographs. Most of them are forgettable, but there were two shots that just happened to have been taken in the same general area, and they have in them someone I haven’t seen in the mirror in many years.

The character on the right is me. I think the shadow on the left might be Jim Stone, but there’s also a chance the silhouette might belong to Steve Folsom. Bill Hampton’s name was stamped on the back of the print, so I’m going to guess what happened.

The object dangling from my left hand is the power cord to a Honeywell Strobonar 65D strobe. I probably unhooked the flash, handed the camera to Bill and said, “Why don’t you try shooting a silhouette of us?”

We’re in the hallway leading to the west parking lot. The music department is down the steps, and a ticket booth is the little outcropping on the left. There was also a phone booth down there, on the far side of the ticket booth, I’m pretty sure. (More about the phone booth in a minute.)

Pretending to buy a ticket

I don’t know why I was pretending to buy a ticket from these women. I also don’t know who they are, so I can’t apologize to them for not washing the print long enough to keep fingerprints and brown spots from showing up.

Confession of a no longer young man

I mentioned the phone booth earlier. I debated telling this story because it shows a little bit about how the teenage boy’s mind works, and it’s not always pretty.

I was standing at a discreet distance from the booth waiting for the person inside it to finish a call. When the door opened, a cute girl that I knew only slightly because she had dated a buddy stepped out, visibly distraught.

I asked if something was the matter, and she jumped into my arms and held on like a drowning person clutching a life preserver. I don’t remember the details, but I think she said she had just gotten some bad news about a family member. As I was trying to come up with something comforting to say, I felt some claws grab into my left shoulder and heard my Evil Angel whispering in my ear, “She’s vulnerable. She is REALLY vulnerable. You could take advantage of that.”

Oh, no, here come the Good Angel

Before I could react to that advice, there was a flutter of wings on my Good Angel landed on the other shoulder. “That would be wrong, and you know it,” he whispered in my ear. “Your Mother taught you better than that.”

I extracted myself from the young woman’s grasp, we chatted for a few minutes while she calmed down, she declined my offer of a ride home, and she walked up these steps and down the hallway. I don’t know that I ever talked to her again.

Just as I was congratulating myself for doing The Right Thing, I heard my Good Angel say to the Bad Angel, “You know, you’re right. She looks pretty darned good from this side, too.”

Funny how things like that will pop into your head when you walk the halls of your old high school. (You have to admit the old building has really been well maintained. I think the walls and floors are shinier now than they were in 1965.)

January 17, 2014

The Folsoms

One of the blessings and curses of Facebook is the feature that tells you who has a birthday coming up. Seeing Linda Folsom’s name pop up reminded me that I had run across this photo of her in a box last summer. The original was a Polaroid taken by her brother, Steve.

I made a deal with Steve

Linda and I dated briefly (the briefly part was her idea). Steve was a fellow photographer on either The Tiger or The Girardot (or both), so I cut him a deal: I’d give him a roll of Tri-X 35mm film for him to shoot informal candids of Linda.

(Whenever I tried to take her picture, she’d threaten to pummel me with my Pentax, something I noticed girls, including Future Wife Lila, were prone to do.)

Steve is the guy with Central’s most unique eyebrows on the left. You’ll have to go to my Mad Men of CHS post to get the IDs of the other guys.

Rat Fink Steve didn’t bring back 36 photos of Linda. In fact, he must have used the roll for something else, because all I got was the single Polaroid above. I wouldn’t tell him, but I always liked the way he captured her smile.

Other Steve photos

Steve the debater
Steve in the Red Dagger play. I think he’s in shots 18, 67, 69 and 70, but I’m not sure about all of them.

The Twin Game

Linda had a twin sister, Laura. The night I walked up to the door for our first date, Linda and Laura played the twin game with me, challenging me to pick the right one. Their grandfather, who must have seen this game before, was standing behind them. He give me the high sign without them seeing him. It wasn’t long before I didn’t need the grandfather’s clue to tell them apart.

Laura is the girl on the far right in the front row of the bus headed to an out-of-town debate trip. This link has a bunch of the students identified by readers. Click on the photo to make it larger.

Betty Folsom

I was looking for some photos of the twins’ mother, Betty, who taught English and Journalism. I came up blank on any photos, but I DID find this press pass she signed for me.

It was fun reading the Facebook comments of the younger relatives of Linda, Laura and Steve who had never seen the trio in their high school days.

September 22, 2013

Mad Men of CHS

For better or worse, for once I can identify all of the people in a photo.

Steve Folsom, son of journalism teacher Betty Folsom, is reading Mad Magazine. He possessed the most unique set of eyebrows at Central High School.

I dated one of his twin sisters, Linda, briefly. (The briefly part was her choice, as I recall.) She and sister Laura weren’t THAT hard to tell apart once you got to know them, but they played the Twin Game the first night I went to pick up my date. Her grandfather, standing behind them, took pity on me and quietly pointed to the right one.

Al Spradling III is next. He was a Tiger business manager.

The next two characters were my debate partners at one time or another. John Mueller and I had an undefeated season my freshman year.You can see other photos of John here.

Pat Sommers, at far right, had a propensity to declare himself Number One in almost every photo I took of him. He is a little more dignified these days. Actually, now that I think of it, I DID shoot a picture of him wearing a tie at a basketball game.

You can click on the photo to make it larger, but that’ll just show up all the dust spots I didn’t bother to retouch out.

February 6, 2012February 6, 2012

Okay, Who Did It?

I’ve already done a page on the Red Dagger’s My Sister Eileen and Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, so when I discovered these frames stuck in with a fire I shot in Ohio, I almost relabeled them and stuck them back in the file. Then I saw something that piqued my interest.

Whose car is this? Who did this nefarious deed? Their timing was good. I see one of the pages is from The Missourian’s Achievement Edition. That was usually the biggest paper of the year. Gaining entry to the car wouldn’t have been difficult. Most folks didn’t lock the doors and about half of them left the keys in the ignition.

Surely these guys didn’t do it

Principal Fred Wilferth and custodian James Criddle were on this roll of film, which means they were in the vicinity of the hooliganism, but they don’t have the guilty look of someone who has just stuffed someone’s car with a week’s worth of papers.

By the way, this film was in pretty bad shape, so I had a choice of spending hours spotting out all the flaws or pretending that the practice took place during a snow storm. I opted for the latter. In one frame there IS a cup flying through the air and water or some other liquid frozen by the strobe flash.

Gallery of the usual suspects

If I was a cop, I’d round up this gang of suspects from My Sister Eileen. I’m pretty sure that at least one of them would crack when you shined the bright light in their eyes. I bet you wouldn’t even have to bring out the rubber hoses. Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the photo until you find the guilty person or persons.

Anola Gill Stowick was kind enough to provide a cast list when I ran the other story. I’m having the names run right now for wants and warrants. We should have this wrapped up in a matter of hours.

Chuck Dockins, Sally Wright, Sherry Harris, Larry Loos, Pat Sommers, Tom Spitzmiller, Steve Crowe, David Reimann, John Reimann, Rick Meinz, Jane Randol, Mike Daniels, Pam Parks, Mike Seabaugh, Steve Folsom, Anola Gill, Lee Dahringer, Don Mowery, John Magill, Preston Foster, Kenny Fischer, Vicky Roth, Jim Stone
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Faculty Director – Kitty Hart, Jerrette Davis, Carl Meyer, Becky McGinty, Steve Strong, Marsha Seabaugh, Janice House, Hilda Hobbs, Martin Hente, Bill Kuster, Tom Holt, Ralph Frye, Shari Stiver, Cheri Huckstep, Tana Austin, Diane Siemers, Betsy Ringland, Francie Hopkins, Ruth Ann Seabaugh, Beth Hayden, Judy Dunklin, Peggy Estes, Judy Brunton, Terry Hinkle, Robin Kratz, Marcia Maupin, Sally Nothdurft, Toni Starkweather, Bunny Blue, Mary Sudholt, Cheryl McClard, Emma Pensel, David Stubbs Ron Hill, Gwynn Sheppard Mary Rickard, Mary Jean Rodgers, Carol Klarsfeld, Dean Kimmich, Donna Eddleman, Marsha Harris, Martha Mahy, Paul Schwab, Amanda Ashby, Della Heise, Don Sander, Anne Buchanan, Ronnie Marshall, John Mueller, Pat Johnson.