If you don’t count key lime Daiquiri parties that burned out three blenders in the mid-1970s, I haven’t been involved in many parties. Here’s an invitation to one being held at the Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum in Altenburg Tuesday, July 17, at 7 p.m.
I’m speaking on Regional Photography and showing off my photos at a conference at the museum in October, so this is a chance for folks to help me weed down my print selections and get a sneak peek at some videos I’ll be presenting then.
Museum director Carla Jordan assured me that appetizers and cocktails will be served. Being as how this is a pioneer German community, there’s a good chance that “cocktails” means beer.
You don’t have to dress up
I’m wearing jeans, so don’t worry about pulling out your fancy duds.
One of my favorite bike rides is from Cape to Altenburg (here’s the scenic, if not most direct route). If you haven’t driven it, you’re in for a treat. You’ll be going through beautiful rolling farmlands.
One caution: Carla says keep your eye open for deer. She’s been spotting a lot of them on her drive to and from Cape. I’ve seen a few. They’re pretty grazing in the fields; they’d be a lot less attractive in the middle of the road.
There’s a quilt show, too
If you don’t think it’s worth driving all that way just to see me, the museum has a “Quilters of Lutheran Ladies Aid” display of quilts made by local women.
Quilt photo gallery
Here’s a gallery of some of the quilts.Click on any image to make it larger, then click on the left of right side of the picture to move through the gallery. Here’s a link to the museum’s website.
I’ve always been fascinated by trains. I remember standing at the Advance train depot with my grandparents to watch the steam engines come puffing in with black smoke boiling from the stacks and a deafening blast of steam when it stopped.
Texas singer and songwriter Guy Clark describes how it was to be six years old in 1947, when the whole town turned out to see a “mad dog, runaway, red-silver streamline train” whiz though for the first time. Up until then, “Trains are big and black and smokin’ – steam screamin’ at the wheels, bigger than anything they is, at least that’s the way she feels…When they finally said ‘train time,’ you’d a-thought that Jesus Christ his-self was rolling down the line. Things got real quiet, momma jerked me back, but not before I’d got the chance to lay a nickel on the track.”
Coins on the track
When Bob, Claire, Mother and I visited Wittenberg the other day, a slow freight pulled slowly through the town, then came to a stop. I tuned the scanner in my car to the train frequencies and heard the engineer talking to dispatch about stopping for a signal that shouldn’t have been red. While they were sorting it out, I thought about Clark’s song and dropped a penny, nickel, dime and quarter on the track.
Watch the video to see what happened.
Crawling under trains at 10
I’ve been around trains quite a bit and have a lot of respect for them. When I was about 10, Dad had a road-building job down in the Bootheel and had the gravel for the job delivered by rail. He’d let me crawl under the hopper cars to bang open the door that would spill the rock onto a conveyor belt. He told me to make sure I didn’t come out from under the car until he gave me the all-clear, then he would have a bulldozer push the cars forward until the next one was ready to dump. (Just think how many regulations that would bust today.)
Where did my pennies go?
When we left to go home one Friday, I put a row of pennies on the main line, expecting to find them when we came back on Monday. When I rushed to the tracks to find zip, Dad explained that a fast, heavy train will smash the coins as thin as tin foil, then it’ll weld them onto the passing wheels or onto the track. To get good results, you had to do it on a siding or when the train was just starting out.
Over the years, I don’t know how many “last rides” I’ve photographed as passenger trains dwindled to a passing few. I rode the Silver Meteor from Florida to Chicago through a 100-year blizzard with drifts so high that they knocked out the headlight on our engine. I rode in the engine of a freight train along the east coast of Florida (where I learned that I couldn’t handle the stress of seeing so many cars drive around closed crossing gates with our engine bearing down on them.
In Gastonia, N.C., I saw a train hit a car that tried to beat it to the crossing. A 16-year-old kid died in my arms.
So, I don’t encourage you to do what I did. Still, like Guy Clark sings in his song, “Oh, but me, I got a nickel smashed flatter than a dime by a mad dog, runaway red-silver streamline train.”
Maybe I’ll leave a coin for Dad
Maybe I’ll leave one of the coins on Dad’s gravestone to show him that I finally pulled it off.
Back in the late 60s, I worked with a photographer named Bob Rogers at The Athens Messenger. I guess I should say I worked FOR Bob, since he was the Chief Photographer and nominally my boss. Here he is in a lighting finger exercise I did for a lighting class. (I was supposed to use two lights. I did: a strobe at the camera, and Bob is touching two wires together to fire a flashbulb mounted in the ceiling of the phone booth).
But, that’s not the point of the story.
“When are you guys getting married?”
One day – maybe even on the day when this photo was taken – when Lila was hanging around our office, Bob asked, in his normal diplomatic way, “So, when are you guys getting married?” (That’s Bob’s foot, bottom center, next to the phone.)
Responding in my diplomatic way, I responded, “Bob, pick a date.”
“June 27,” was his answer.
For some reason, that date didn’t work out, so we got married June 23, 1969, 43 years ago. To this day, when anyone asks when we got married, I always say June 27, because that’s the date that stuck in my memory.
Where’s Bob?
I lost track of Bob in 1970 when he sent me a postcard photo of himself climbing a mountain somewhere. I had no idea if he was buried under tons of snow and ice or if he had just lost my address. A few Internet searches over the years turned up way too many people with that name to track down. Finally, out of the blue, he found my bike blog. That’s where I discovered that he and his wife, Claire, are an extraordinary couple who have had adventures most of us have only dreamed about (in some cases, you might classify them as nightmares.) You can read about their world-wide meanderings all over the world by bicycle on their blog, The New Bohemians.
Bob happened to mention that they were traveling in their RV from Arizona to his 50th high school reunion in West Virginia and would love to see if Cape was anything like he’d been reading about. We arranged to get together, coincidentally on our wedding anniversary.
Anniversary celebrated with musical tribute
Bob and Claire cooked a wonderful supper, then Mother joined them in a musical tribute to us. Wife Lila recorded the action on her iPhone.
Stunned silence
Me, I just sat there in stunned silence, much like I did 43 years ago.
Lila was much more articulate. She said, “Old friends, old song, old married couple. Good times.”
I was running errands when Wife Lila called my cell. “You’re not going to be able to come home,” she said.
I was mentally running down a check list of possible infractions that would be THAT serious when she said, “The building across the street blew up and is on fire. All of the streets around us are blocked off.”
She sure was right about that. The streets north of us, south of us and to our east were all blocked off. OUR street, however, had a tiny gap between two police cars that could just fit my van. I squeezed through and drove all the way to where crime scene tape crossed the street about where our yard begins. As I was walking toward the tape, a cop started walking toward me. “I live at 620,” I said, gesturing to our house.
“That one?” he pointed.
“Yep.” He waved me through. As it turned out, all of the cops and firefighters who worked the incident were friendly. (Click on any photo to make it larger.)
Lila can shoot a great fire video
Wife Lila was busy recording the whole thing with her Canon PowerShot SD1200IS. I was really impressed at how she shot from as many angles as possible, zoomed without making you feel like your eyes were on yo-yos, got some decent cutaways and told the whole story. Based on how well she did with a point-and-shoot still camera taking video, I’m afraid the wrong Steinhoff might have been chasing sirens all these years.
Just about the time I started to download the photos from our various cameras, a reporter from one of the local TV stations rang the doorbell and said he heard on the street that Lila had good fire video. They wouldn’t pay anything, but they DID give her credit on the 11 o’clock news.
When the memory card in her camera filled up, I went inside to get her my Canon FS100 Camcorder. At the same time, I grabbed my Nikon D3100. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but I didn’t have any desire to shoot the incident. First off, it was pretty much over except for the cleanup, and, secondly, I didn’t want to get into a hassle with anybody. Those days are over.
Fire pix for the fun of it
Still, since the guys had been so nice, I went over to them while they were rolling up their hose to see if they’d like a group portrait. They lined up and I knocked off a couple of frames. It reminded me a little of the cliche shot I took years ago of a bunch of firemen (they were all male in those days) posing in front of a burning building that had been set on fire for a drill.
No one was inside the building at the time of the fire and no injuries were reported. The fire is under investigation. It’ll be interesting to hear what the cause was. There has been talk in the neighborhood about a strong smell of acetone coming from one of the bays where the fire appeared to originate. But, like one of the fireman said, “They just pay me to squirt water on it, not to figure out what caused it.”
