Senator Pepper

I guess this was about twenty or twenty-five years ago, about the time when Barry went from calling itself a college to calling itself a university. Barry is a few miles south of where I live and I did all of their photography for about twenty-five years. One of the reporters at the North Dade Journal left the newspaper for the position of public relations director at Barry College which at the time was a Catholic girls school. I'd been working with her for a few years at the paper and she started to call me to shoot events at Barry.

Senator Claude Pepper was the Grand Old Man of North Dade County politics, and he was always willing to speak someplace about something. If it had anything, anything at all about what was going on, he knew everything about it and was only too happy to step up to the podium. I have no idea what was happening this day but I suspect that it was the groundbreaking for the new library, based on the background. Claude Pepper had no doubt been instrumental in getting a few million dollars of public funding to help with the project. I'd photographed the senator on dozens of occasions and he thought it was an OK idea. I set the camera and handed it off to somebody ~ CLICK! ~ and this was the result

This was about the time that I'd decided that damnit! if I was going to be taking everybody's photo being pals with the bigwigs I wanted to start getting some pix with me also. Now that the good senator is no longer around I can't put him in charge of the white hair, nor can he put me in charge of the brown hair, like we used to do in the old days. Now I wear a mixture of both in memory of a great man.