Snapshots Into the Souls of Another Time

You see them in boxes at swap meets and thrift shops. Souls for sale. Assorted. Mixed. Unwanted, leftover, discarded, unclaimed souls. Souls of cats, souls of sailors, a hero of the Dutch underground in World War II. Souls of Mom and Grandma, of sunburned swimmers, of cousin Edith at her Old Glory-draped piano, of Billie, “the best kid in the world.”

Go ahead and rummage. Some are 50 cents, some are a dollar. All you can carry. Officer Artie Kilpatrick, in his nice new uniform, one morning in 1946? Fifty cents. Larry, the faithful spaniel mix? Fifty cents. The Kleine kids? Nice little souls. A dollar. Bessie Weaver Howard and her blind husband, Clarence? A dollar.

They always come, the living ones, to sift and sift, throwing some aside and saving others, like sorting apples. Picking over piles of souls captured somewhere between a tick and a tock, once upon a time, in a moment when life was good, long ago. Old souls. Lost souls, now.

Hasselblad stole them, and Kodak and Polaroid. Once they were keepsakes; now, no one keeps them. They’re knickknacks, curios, research for someone’s term paper or period movie. It’s indecent, isn’t it? To wind up with no one to remember you, for sale in a secondhand store or on a folding table in a parking lot. It’s enough to make you think the camera is the devil--but of course, that’s not right. The devil is time.

One sunny Sunday morning at the Pasadena City College Swap Meet, passing by boxes of the gone-and-forgotten for sale, I snatched a few souls from oblivion, if only to rescue them for a moment, with a remembrance in these pages. The devil Time had swallowed them; I reached down the devil’s throat and took a few back.

“Let’s see,” I thought to myself, digging into the black-and-white paper graveyard, “who’s coming with me. You, sir? Yes, nice double-breasted suit. Stylish. Wonderful how you’ve folded your handkerchief into three corners, like sails on a schooner. Good ‘30s mustache too. And autographed, ‘Best regards, Jim.’ Alas, poor Jim! You’re coming with me.”

I grabbed more apples. The handsome couple on the deck of the Majestic, on some long-dead holiday--the proud gentleman in a three-piece pinstriped suit, skimmer in hand, arm around the lady with the flapper-era hat, knee-length cloth coat, modest smile.

Apple-cheeked Allen Lynch, age 7 or 8, carefree in his white sailor suit, big black bow tie, and shiny laced boots, circa 1920.

A boy with buzz cut and summer overalls, sitting in the tall grass by a picket fence--right next to old Grandpa who, judging by Alpine hat and long-stemmed pipe, hailed from the old country.

The effervescent-looking young woman, braid crowning mid-parted hair, clutching pocketbook and striped suit coat, smiling a little tensely on a dock in front of the battleship Mississippi, late ‘30s or ‘40s. Had she just said goodbye to a sweetheart? Or was her sweetheart on leave from the boat, and holding the camera?

*

Some were unintentional works of art, complete with title. There was a sturdy immigrant woman, holding her chin up proudly against a backdrop of brick wall and white sky. “ ‘On the roof,’ 5/20/26,” was written on the back.

There was a classic young American sweetheart, with string of pearls, floppy lace bonnet and a smile indigenous to youth--marked only, “Monday, Oct. 21, 1929.” A sweet Monday, long eclipsed.

And an image that could have been a painting by Monet, or Mary Cassatt: a lanky teenage girl in new overalls and white blouse, her hair in a pageboy cut, kneeling on a sun-drenched lawn in front of a light-dappled tree, holding a fat tabby in place for the camera. She barely smiles, her facial expression tentative with the insecurity of her years. Written on the back, next to the developer’s stamp of Bismark, N.D., were the unwittingly poetic words, “Summer of 1930.” An American Midwest summer, buzzing with insects and humidity, a summer of new overalls and a beloved cat, of the small mysteries of 13 or 14. . . .

“Would you like a box for those?” asked a woman in a straw hat, the purveyor of the souls. “No, thanks,” I said, and barraged her with questions. Who buys these? Where do they come from? Doesn’t she feel haunted?

The woman turned out to be a former L.A. city schools P.E. teacher named Peggy Goodwin. She said she fell in love with photography while visiting Ansel Adams’ Best Studio in Yosemite in the 1940s, and years later took up frequenting estate sales in search of choice portraits, snapshots, albums. No, she said, she doesn’t feel haunted--she enjoys the time-travel aspect of her hobby, and “just the warmness of their lives is the thing you enjoy; you see so many people who had happy lives and were so loved.”

So loved? Then why were they discarded? Families die off, she explained, or just lose interest in preserving their histories. Eventually, Peggy collected so many that she decided to sell them.

What kind of a market was there? A good one, she said. Libraries use them for research into local history--and movie studios, for setting and costume details. Art students make collages out of them. Historians sometimes find valuable things lurking in the backgrounds of casual snapshots--a building that has since been torn down, a now-collectible automobile. Train buffs look for defunct choo-choos; jewelry collectors look for old broaches and stick pins. And some lonely people create surrogate family trees with them. Lost souls for lost souls. . . .

“Yes, a lot of people in this day and age really don’t have a family,” Peggy said, “maybe because they’re adopted, or because of deaths, or people moved away. So they look for sort of an instant ancestry. You don’t have roots and want to develop a sense of belonging, history. I’ll hear this type of remark at least 10 times a year. Mostly from people in their late 20s.”

*

I should have been comforted by Peggy’s explanations as I continued poring over shots of three generations of immigrant daughters in frumpy dresses, broaches and bonnets; of a happy couple displaying their day’s fishing catch. But I wasn’t. History, posterity, art, an orphanage for imaginary surrogate fathers, aunts, cousins. . . . It seemed ignoble fate for once-cherished images of, as Peggy put it, so many people who had happy days and were so loved. Or maybe I just feared winding up in a swap meet myself one day. I ferreted further.

There was Robert Dainsworth, Dave Rogers and Robert Dickson, three pals in blizzard-coated Cairo, Ill., on Jan. 12, 1918. “3 Aces,” the photo read. Were they really biplane sharpshooters in World War I?

There was a pure Goldilocks of a girl, with fat, cascading curls and a shiny hair ribbon taken in an Omaha, Neb., studio--the back inscribed, in Norwegian, “En Lille Nytaarshilsen til Onkel Stans fra Elna Pedersen.” Translation: “A little New Year’s greeting to Uncle Stans from Elna Pedersen.” What had happened to little Elna? Had she grown up to be as beautiful as the photo promised? Did she leave Omaha? Marry a stockbroker?

“To Billie! From Hildegard,” in fancy handwriting, read the back of a July 15, 1940, pose of two young people, apparently, Billie and Hildegard, with the postscript “To the best kid in the world.” Pen pals meeting for the first time? Wartime lovers?

Three women were captured in front of an ivy-covered trellis and wooden porch of 80 or 90 years ago, in day-to-day, functional non-poses of a type the painter Caillebotte relished. The back of the photo told the story of the moment: “Momma’s back view” (a stocky woman heading into the house), Greta (sitting on the porch, hands around her ankles, smiling in preparation for the photo) and “a friend with a melon” (a woman passing by in the foreground, carrying a casaba, pushing her hair back, maybe getting ready for the camera).

I gathered them all up. A little girl with new front teeth, holding her fat-cheeked baby sister, once upon a time. The little Kleine boys, in swimsuits, arms around each other, July 1938. Pals forever.

Teenage Edith Oliver standing awkwardly in front of her piano, in white recital dress and white elbow-length gloves, award ribbon pinned to her bodice, some kind of diploma in hand.

Two giggling ladies peeking around either side of a big pine tree, one with an arm around the trunk. The back read, in part, “We did not have our hair combed, dirty as pigs, but I knew you would like to see us. That is a pine tree in our front yard. . . . Clem said this was the first decent house along the road. When are you coming? Come this summer.” I hoped their visitors had come.

A handsome, strapping gentleman in white shirt sleeves and dark trousers, sitting easily in a folding chair outside a koffiehuis in Holland, with the remarkable description on the reverse: “Mr. Brunsweld of Wassemoor--we stayed here at the Sport cafe for free. He was head of the underground in Holland and a volunteer for years in the British Exped. Forces.” A hero, apparently, sitting eternally outside his cafe. . . .

And I made them all a promise, those paper-and-chemical souls, that at least for a moment, they would be noticed again.

It was all I could do.