Staying The Course - Full Speed Ahead

This is one of my "self-portrait" series from sometime in the last year, part of a still ongoing project. I thought of using it today as I was driving home early this evening from about as far north as you can go in Broward County, still charged up from having this blog chosen as a Yahoo! Pick of the Week and from all the excitement of attending Jim and Linda Kukar's reception this afternoon. They actually got married a bunch of months ago, but today was the party, the celebration with family and friends, and I just had to be there!

I'd never met Linda before, not beyond the occasional few words on the phone after saying "Hi Linda, this is Al. Is Jim there?" Strange really, when you consider that Jim and I exchange Emails all the time and try to get together for late "breakfast" when Jim gets off from his job as a copy editor at the Miami Herald. When I say late I'm talking 11 at night, not morning, but we usually meet at an IHOP and breakfast is their specialty.

Jim and I go way back to about 1969 when the Herald hired him to edit the Norh Dade Journal, which is now called Neighbors North and isn't the paper it was then. I got introduced all around to Herald people with whom he now works, we told stories back and forth about our adventures together over the years, about how he'd rented a house from Linda Lovelace and her boyfriend not knowing at the time that they were off making a movie called "Deep Throat". He bragged about the talent he had working there, form a young photographer named Nathan Benn who went on to a succesful career with National Geographic and finally headed up the New York office of Magnum, the international picture agency, to Jim Kerr who moved on to writing TV sitcoms and created Married With Children.

This is a town where people come and go, and journalism is a field where "moving up" oft times means taking a job clear across the country. It's kind of a unique situation, two guys who have worked together for a variety of publications over nearly forty years, and developed a friendship like we have. Thank you Jim. Linda, take good care of him.

P.S. Want an archival quality print of this or one of my other photos? E-mail me at preacherpop42@aol.com for details.