The Mothers

Twenty years ago when I made my run for city council my mother (the short lady on the right) and my opponent's mother were out there at their neighborhood polling places weilding campaign signs for their sons. They both lived in the same precinct.

My mom, Ruth B. Solomon, had never professed much interest in politics, yet some of my earliest memories include walking with either her or my grandmother the five or six blocks to the Betsy B. Winslow Elementary School on Eection Day where we'd go down the half fight of stairs to the basement where the voting took place.

Even at the ager of two or three I got the lecture on how we lived in a democracy and it was our solemn duty to vote to preserve our freedoms. I was told that in places like Nazi Germany, Russia, Poland, and a bunch of other countries people didn't get the chance to vote for their leaders.

In a way we really didn't either. Voting was often along religious or ethnic lines. Adult conversation in the weeks leading up to an election was often filled with "We should vote for so-and-so because he's Jewish, and since Hymie Rosen retired we haven't had a Jew on the City Council!" But other times it was "Vote for Manny Goulart's cousin because Manny is Grandpa's business partner. They own the Dean Bldg. in the North End and the Olympia Bldg. in the middle of downtown New Bedford. They're old friends!" and it didn't matter that Manny was Catholic and proud of his Portuguese heritage.

I'm not really sure how these two guys became such good friends but I have my suspicion that it had to do with smuggling. My grandfather had been in the wholesale liquor business both before and after prohibition. Manny owned a small fleet of commercial fishing boats that fished for cod and haddock of the coast of Newfoundland in Canada. Booze stayed legal there. I suspect that all of those boatloads of fish had a layer of fish covering bottles of whiskey and kegs of beer mixed with the ice.

We lived way too well to be doing it on half of the profits from a small strip of retail shops and a four story office building, both of which were half vacant most of the time.

Aunt Ruth and Her Nephews Herb And Nat

Aunt Ruth is my mother and her older sister Lillian had three sons and a daughter. We lived in New Bedford but Lil was married to Harry Shapiro, a cigar smoking attorney, and they lived in Brockton, about thirty miles north of New Bedford. It was an hour's drive through two lane winding country roads that ran down the main street and through the center of every little village along the way. The interstates were still in the planning stage at that point, but every few weeks either we'd drive to Brockton or they'd drive to New Bedford.

That's my mom on the left with her typical 1961 permed hair chatting with her two older nephews. Nat, the tall one, had graduated from Clark University in Worcester, while Herb had made the family proud. He was attending Dartmouth, one of the prestigous top "Ivy League" schools. On rare occasions my cousins visit Miami with their wives and we'll get together for lunch or dinner.

A Working Waterfront ~ The Irene & Hilda

Here's another "scanned from the contact sheet" shot. The scene is commercial fishing boats in my home town of New Bedford,MA. back in 1965. A century earlier square rigged whaling ships off loaded barrels of whale oil at these very same wharves.

The photo reminded me of a current ongoing battle over the Miami River and the waterfront here. The small companies that haul freight to and from the Bahamas and the Carribian islands dock there, as they have for decades. Suddenly developers want to build waterfront high rise condos along the shoreline and construct office towers with waterfront views. Suddenly the land is too valuable for fishing boats.

There's a lot of money at stake, a lot of pressure to change the zoning, and a lot of resistance to the changes. Rich investors versus hard working seamen. Who's going to win? Expect the price of fish to go up. The price of land already has.

Bill Metcalf, November 1964

It's photos like this, images that lay hidden in my files for 45 years, that have me shooting once more with size 120 black and white film in a Minolta Autocord or Rolleiflex. The handling is different than with an eye level camera, the whole way of looking at the world is different. It's a slower more contemplative way of working. Of course if you print directly from the negative, which is much larger than a 35mm negative, you can get some fantastic prints, nothing like these scans off the contact sheets.

Bill Metcalf was an artist friend of mine in New Bedford, MA. My bride to be, Stephanie, and I were in town to join my grandmother and my dad for Thanksgivng dinner. I was was also attempting to introduce Stephanie to my circle of New Bedford based friends. Bill was going to the Swain School of Design. He lived in a basement apartment on a hill (one end of the place was really a basement while the downhil side was but two steps down) a few blocks from downtown and a few blocks from the school. Bill always seemed to have friends dropping by. It was a good place for Stephanie to meet some of my friends.

I just about never hear from or about any of the people I hung out with in the sixties. We're dying off.

One Of My Favorite Images

I have a beautiful 11X14 print of this image framed and hanging on the wall but my scanner is too small. This is another one of those horrid old contact sheets that I used for the scan. The partial white circle on the upper left is where I'd punched a hole for the three ring binder where I used to keep them.

At the time we were living in a third floor apartment in New Bedford, Mass. I was playing around with using a pin hole aperture in front of the lens on my Minolta Autocord. I arrasnged several items on the kitchen table in front of the window. The sea gull is one of a pair of book ends. The other had a broken wing and eventually this one broke also. The ashtray was made by my father during one of his arty phases. I put the Minolta Autocord on a tripod, stuck the pin hole between the lens and a light yellow filter. I made several exposures, ranging from about one to perhaps five minute long. This particular one has a ghost cigarette. I'd forgotten that the cigarette was burning in the ashtray as part of the composition and picked it up for a toke about halfway through the exposure. I liked this shot best.

Sue Simonsis ~ An Email From Her Daughter Forty-Four Years Later

People tell me that they like this blog because they never know day to day what's going to show up, everything from current local political commentary to pictures from my wilder twenty-something days. Some folks tell me they enjoy the stories that run with the photos. I get emails telling me that they were at such and such a rock festival also, or the photo and caption reminded them of another festival they attended. In one case a self described "very fat grandmother" remembered me from when I did some photos at a Christian drug rehab center and she was a good looking sixteen year old in the program. I think she'd just smoked pot but her parents had freaked!

This photo is different. Beth sent me an email yesterday. It seems that she ran across some photos of her mom and dad, Sue and Wayne Simonsis, in my blog. She wanted to know if I had some other photos of them from way back in the winter of 1965/66 when my wife Stephanie and I had an apartment in the same building in New Bedford, Massachusettes. Fortunately I'd scribbled the negative number on the back of the print. Now I can easily go through the files and find the rest of them. I've even got an 11x14 of a different picture of Sue that's been framed and hanging on my wall all of these years. I'm waiting to get another email from Beth. Sue would have been about 19 in the pictures. Now Beth might have grandchildren that age!

My Dad's Three Older Brothers, Circa 192?

My dad was the youngest of four brothers. I never did find out for sure if Grandma Kaplan was making a final attempt at getting a daughter or if my father was just an accident. She may well have only planned on two children, but the second pregnancy produced identical twin boys, Sydney (usually a girl's name spelling, but that's how she wanted it) and Nathan. Seymour was the oldest.

Actually, the third pregnancy was an accident theory might well be the real truth because there was such as long gap between the second and third pregnancies. My dad would have barely been a toddler when this picture was taken.

Seymore always had wavy hair. That's him on the left. As to which one is Sydney and which one is Nathan? I have no idea. They're twins, right?

Fishing For Pickerel, Catching Perch ~ 1965

That first year that Stephanie and I were married we discovered a lot of things about one another. We'd only met a few days before we got married on December fourth, 1964, mid winter in Boston. She didn't know that I had a passion for fishing and I had no idea that she'd never fished before. Came spring time and I gave her some basic casting lessons at the park.

Anybody who's ever done much fishing knows that all fish aren't trophy size and you don't always catch fish. Come opening day of the fishing season and Stephanie managed to land a 5 lb. 14 oz. largemouth bass, along with a mess of smaller ones and several yellow perch. A week later she caught a 5 lb. pickerel. They were all caught with a bucktail jig on 4 lb. test line. She'd caught the fever! We spent our weekends fishing!

I'd already I sold my Honda motorcycle and bought a '64 Volkswagen. We started looking for a boat. When we found this 12 foot Penn Yan we both fell in love with it. The canvas covering was bright red and the varnished cedar planking with ash ribs on the inside made it look like a piece of fine furniture. It cost us $120 and it lived atop the VW for several years.

Stephanie might have been the one to catch all the big fish but I kept trying. Here's a shot she took of me in the old New Bedford Resevoir with a white perch. See! I could catch fish! They were just a lot smaller than the ones that she caught. She was using our "fishing camera", an old Minolta Autocord that went on to photograph several hundred weddings before I sold it for more than I'd paid for it.