Chicagoist Presents: From the Vault of Art Shay

Life Magazine\'s own vault has just posted the five best ever New Year\'s Eve pictures they ever published. One of my computer savvy collectors sent me their reproduction of the picture above. I made it with two synchronized strobe lights at the Drake Hotel on the stroke of midnight, 1956. It ran as a full page. I was 34 then and now am... 54 years older and not nearly as smart as I thought I was then. At the time, for example, I thought that flying 52 combat missions against the Nazis had made the world safe for us all to bring up our kids.\r\n\r\n

For more than ten years I wandered the mostly lower depth purlieus of Chicago with novelist Nelson Algren. I met him while working on a shoot for Life Magazine. (I\'ll spare you the details until I present an extended essay on my dear friend, godfather of my first son.) What was happening in the above 1950 Riccardo\'s Restaurant photograph of Algren and the beautiful African-American Janice Kingslow, the gorgeous swimmer and 38-25-37 star of Anna Lucasta. Aw hell, Janice\'s sometimes lover Nelson was trying to get her into Otto Preminger\'s movie of The Man with the Golden Arm opposite Frank Sinatra - sorry Aaron Bohrod, I forget which was your panel over the bar. As I say, some other time. That\'s how surreal memory works in the old, if it works at all... I am cursed with a wonderful memory.

Mostly I worked for the Time Inc. magazines - \<em\>Time\<\/em\>, \<em\>Life\<\/em\>, \<em\>Fortune\<\/em\>, \<em\>Sports Illustrated\<\/em\>. But my German car mechanic Klaus and his wife Erma told me of their passion for square dancing and I sold this picture to \<em\>LOOK\<\/em\>. I really wanted to have the do-si-doers make a series of blurry rosettes as they danced in small circles- but I somehow couldn\'t hold the crowd\'s attention for \<em\>LOOK\<\/em\>. The word \"LIFE\" would have worked better. Klaus was a master mechanic when I first met him. He and his Chinese partner Wai Cheng had a small business fixing cars in your driveway while you were away or in the parking lot of your company while you were working. They wore red jump suits, had a van with nuts, bolts and small parts filed in bins along the inner walls, German style, and fixed my ancient rachitic Peugeot wagon that my daughter Lauren had driven through Mexico - for 25 bucks. The fact that Klaus looked just like the Luftwaffe pilot I shot down in his FW 190 at 50 yards always disturbed me, but the war was long over. I did a half page story on them for the \<em\>Sunday Tribune Magazine\<\/em\> - and they got 270 calls the first two days- enough to set up a three-car repair shop in Highland Park. Within eight years they\'d made enough money to retire and move to Arizona. Florence and I sent them myriad friends and relatives with ailing cars- this was in the decades before Toyota and Honda- and they fixed ‘em all at budget prices. Erma learned the business so quickly and so well that she would ask a client on the phone questions like, \"Tell me vat color eez ze oil zat\'s leaking and where does eet hit ze concete? It may be brake fluid...\" It was that vaunted German attention to detail! I refused to wonder if they had been Nazis in the old country and if I, as a navigator, had ever bombed their home town. They were great at their trade, honest to the penny, frugal. They often expressed their gratitude for the article that started them in business. But I never asked for or got a discount. \r\n\r\nAs their departure loomed, Erma called me to point out that my son Dick owed $130 dollars and forty cents on a Plymouth repair, and she was sending her son over to collect, \"Und you get ze money back fum Dick, yah?\" So when Roland arrived I had my check waiting.\r\n\r\nHalf an hour later, Erma called again. \"Art,\" she said. \"You heard me wrong. Dick owes me a hundred forty dollars and thirty cents. I veel sent Roland right back, for the proper check, yah?\" \"Yah,\" I said, wondering how we won WW2, but glad that we did and were able to save the free world and all. \r\n\r\nMy goodness, subjecting you myriad viewers to the above steam of consciousness at the drop of a silly picture for \<em\>LOOK\<\/em\>. As Studs used to say, \"So it\'s all connected, isn\'t it?\"\r\n\r\n(This picture was made with a 4x5 Linhof with a 90 mm Super Angulon lens, Ektachrome film, with a 40 magenta filter to balance the greenish arc lamps of the gym.)

I was shooting the Gaslight Club at New Year\'s time 1963 for \<em\>Holiday\<\/em\> magazine. Near the entrance to one of the rear rooms was a naughty statue of a naked lady that had graced the infamous brothel run by the famous Everleigh sister madams. My editor was so taken with the statue I almost forgot to shoot the real live girls brightening the 1963 New Year\'s Eve. I learned just the other day that the house in Deerfield that once belonged to a physician I knew- had been used as a sub rosa rest home for tired Everleigh harlots. None of this excuses the lack of synchronicity of those long legs that kept the picture out of the magazine. It helps only if you realize those chorines are all over 70 now.

I still remember the excitement of shooting the two central cores of the Marina Towers. It was the dawning of the Sixties and \<em\>The Saturday Evening Post\<\/em\> had sent me to shoot the start of the towers with a young builder- intimate of City Hall - a foreigner who was making good. I shot him arriving to the ground from a Tower on a cable that swayed dangerously. By 1964 I was able to shoot the finished towers framed in a forlorn Wacker Drive tree as New Year\'s Eve snow began to fall.

Around New Year\'s 1980 I told my old friend and client Chuck Percy, president of Bell & Howell and later Senator of Illinois, that \<em\>Reader\'s Digest\<\/em\> had hired me to shoot Chicago from the air at night, something almost impossible to do well at the time given the limits of lenses and film. Chuck, whom I had shot for \<em\>Fortune\<\/em\> and whose family Christmas pictures I did for fun, handed a beautiful camera across his desk. A Canon VII. It had a huge, Canon .095 lens on it. Number 60. It was, outside the space program, the fastest lens in the world. He gave the rig to me on permanent loan. So the picture above was made with that gorgeous lens wide open and with the Canon shutter at 1/250th of a second.Ektachrome 100 pushed a stop. For $80 I hired an amateur pilot I liked whose daytime job was as a \<em\>Sun-Times\<\/em\> reporter. My first flight with Carl Lavin had been to photograph Gary for \<em\>Chicago\<\/em\> magazine. My beautiful daughter had come along to change film for me and work my nack-up camera- and it was love at first flight- They were married a year later and presented Florence and me with three grandsons and a grand-daughter (and soon to be great-grandchild!). I just called an old writer friend to tell her of this picture showing her pad, Oak Street Beach as it was 30 years ago and the New Year’s snow forming on the lake shore. She invited me to drop in - without the plane - any old time. She and I worked on the Speck murder story, and she was grateful to me for correcting the spelling of one word. Rackets, as in racketeer - she misspelled, society chick that she was, as racquets. My pilot\'s wife, daughter Lauren, would live for a time on the 44th floor of the Hancock Building, just above that tiara of lights. Again, as Studs said, \"It\'s all connected isn\'t it.\"

I bought my daughter Jane a car with which to weather DePaul Law School. It somehow disappeared in this snow of 1979 or one like it. Jane still thinks it was trucked away by the city in a big ball of snow. No matter, Jane survived DePaul that winter and several others, and became the first law student in U.S. history to have a case in the U.S. Supreme Court with her teacher reading her unlicensed brief. The case involved payments to blood relatives of adopted kids. The law had kept them from getting the kids\' welfare payments. Jane thought this unfair. Years later Governor Jim Thompson - I helped teach him racquetball and even got him on the cover of \<em\>National Racquetball Magazine\<\/em\>. He once told me in the gym that Jane had cost the state 20 million bucks. Then added, \"But she was right.\"