From the Vault of Art Shay: "All the Creatures"

\<strong\>Leopard Coat Ladies\<\/strong\>, circa 1970. The husband of my lovely neighbor Pat begged me to take on his painter-artist wife as a photo student for school credit at the School of the Art Institute where she was enrolled. I agreed and, on the very first day, I drove us to the Lincoln Park Zoo where she loaded her Nikon with my Tri-X and began listening to my spiel about seeing, looking, and thinking. Suddenly, about sixty yards south of our bench, I saw this lady in her tight nylon leopard coat ambling toward us. I grabbed Pat\'s camera and ran to a position on the walk near the leopard\'s cage and in five seconds had made the frame you see and several others. I apologized to Pat for the grab, explaining if I had stopped to teach her what to do the picture would have been gone. This picture has been very popular with my collectors since I used it as the cover of my \<i\>Animals\<\/i\> book, which still sells briskly at Titles in Highland Park, my wife\'s rare book shop.

\<strong\>Smoking Doggie\<\/strong\>,\r\ncirca 1970. My \<i\>Life\<\/i\> reporter was a gorgeous six foot tall redhead who was, at the time, er- close to the great African American still and movie shooter, Gordon Parks. Our project had been wandering New Jersey, shooting weekend social activity at estates belonging to the Gambinos, Geneveses, Cavalcantes, Columbos, Bonnanos, Lucheses and Catellanos- all the real-life progenitors of what would become \<i\>The Sopranos\<\/i\> in a few seasons. Crossing under the Hudson on the late afternoon we got an FBI clue (\<i\>Life\<\/i\> shared some secrets with them) that some of the boys would be meeting in a cafe on Mulberry Street across from a church. I had my 400mm Novoflex lens mounted on my Nikon in my lap and my reporter was driving telling me how exciting it was to work with Gordon Parks. Suddenly, about a block away, as I sighted through my telephoto- I saw this big dog that appeared to be taking a smoking break out his fourth floor window. Three quick frames and I made $500 for \<i\>Life\'s\<\/i\> “Next Week” back page picture. So we raced down to Mulberry Street- and there are the boys going in and out of the cafe, enjoying the summer Sunday.\r\n\r\nI couldn\'t walk up, even with a hidden camera and spook them. I got an idea. I ran into a variety store and bought a beret for myself and a bunch of costume jewelry for my reporter. Then, starting on the church steps, I began a fake fashion shoot of my striking redhead stepping up and down, waving cheap jewelry as I mimicked an effeminate photographer, my beret imparting the right foreign touch. With my medium telephoto I shot right past her face and jewelry and sighted on Gambinos, Lucheses and other pre-Gandolfini big and medium shots. In a few minutes we had a gaggle of street kids mocking my motions- and better yet, more Mafioso coming to the doorway of their cafe to see what all the commotion was about. But the smoking dog was my shot of the day, the other pictures used during the years by the Time Inc. magazines and the Getty picture agency that sells Time Inc. pictures across the world. I was happy to see that Parks used our mutual brave redhead in at least one of his movies.\r\n\r\n\r\n

\<strong\> Intruders Beware\r\n\<\/strong\> circa 1951. Just east of the main Post Office, the Eisenhower Expressway was starting to take shape. Under it was a generous seeding of limestone aggregate that Col. Henry Crown was enterprisingly digging out of Lake Michigan with Grafe-Callahan and processing in the shadow of the Eskimo statue at the lake and Addison (and saving Chicago a fortune). Every alderman was so busy secretly acquiring the filling station rights of the off-ramps, no one had time to notice the congeries of abandoned trucks and recluses moving into them as homes. Among them was Lucy and her two dogs, Mary and Joseph. At night Lucy made a wood fire in back of her home and entertained a suitor or two, if they were well-behaved and brought some food for her brood.\r\n\r\nA few months ago I made a $2200 mistake. I hired an editor with one credential and lots of talk about friends in high places to go through piles of my pictures and pick the best ones for a proposed book. When she put the above picture on her discard file, I knew I was in trouble and fired her.\r\n

\<strong\> You Can Be an Ugly Pig but Still Love a Beautiful Swan.\r\n\<\/strong\>, 1959. My friend Nelson Algren had a cottage on Miller Beach, IN. I helped him move there, hitching an eight buck a day trailer to my ‘49 Pontiac. He befriended a farm family nearby who were landlords to a few pigs and swans. The pig, Otto, would rattle the farmhouse door at sundown either seeking entrance or settling for a can of Weidemann\'s beer which he would expertly chug down. He was a little too snobby for the lady pigs on hand, Nelson learned, but thought I might peddle a story to \<i\>Life\<\/i\> on Otto\'s love affair with Ophelia, a swan who had lost her lifetime mate to some teenagers with a bow and arrow. So Otto would nose around Ophelia of an afternoon and, as the farmer told me, just the other day tried to mount Ophelia, who fussed and fluttered but didn\'t retreat. There seemed to be more unfulfilled swan love on this little pond than in the last performance of Swan Lake at the Civic Opera House. \"If you can get them actually doing it,\" said my interspecies editor at \<i\>Life\<\/i\>. \"It might be a hell of a full page- but then again we might not be able to run it because of DT.\" (“DT” stood for dinner table.) \"Do you want to run something in \<i\>Life\<\/i\> that would be unpalatable on the dinner table?\" Alas, a great picture had failed the DT test- and there may have gone a Nobel Prize. Everyone liked this post-coital picture but one editor summed it up. If only one of them had smoked a cigarette…

\<b\>When The Hind Teat Ain\'t Enough\<\/b\>\r\n1949. \<i\>This Week\<\/i\> magazine was a supplement like \<i\>Parade\<\/i\> but had twice the circulation- about 13 million. They hired me to sneak into the Chicago Stockyards and photograph a story they were doing on animal abuse. Specifically, of animals being carelessly trucked in for slaughter from midwestern farms. The death rate of pregnant hogs was exorbitant because of overloading of the trucks. Poor baby pigs, like Spotted Poland Emil above, with no living mother to nurse them after being born en route to Chicago, would inevitably seek out dead mamas, get a soupcon of milk, then die in less than a day. The mother of this little pig, his Spotted Poland dam, can be seen, expired in the background right. Beyond it is the overcrowded truck both unlucky porkers arrived on. My story of Emil\'s first and last day drew 25,000 responses and helped change the way hogs, especially those bound for slaughter, were treated.

\<strong\>Nice Old Lady Faces Death\<\/strong\>, 1958. Returning from a New York lunch with some editor friends of mine, I whipped out my new black 3-frames-a-second Nikon SP rangefinder camera to test on some skyscrapers. Instead, in my finder, I found a little old lady confronting a completely unexpected death. Note the solemn guy at the far left reacting with the same distaste. Mortality, alas, always makes for interesting pictures. \<b\>Afterthought:\<\/b\> A few years later I was shooting the president of Parker pen with this camera at his Wisconsin headquarters when he (a camera nut) fell in love with it and had to have it. Alas, I let him bid me up to four times the selling price- and have regretted it ever since. I just Googled it: $7349 without a lens. He also threw in a top-of-the-line pen. I\'ll bet his estate still has it and it\'s still like new.

\<strong\>Big Tuna Passing Big Lion\<\/strong\>, 1958. I had photographed Chicago Mafia capo Tony Accardo, who headed the entire midwest Mafia operation according to the FBI, as he had testified for the first time at the Federal Courthouse. An informant had told me where Tony was being held- and I got a close-up frame of him that \<i\>Life\<\/i\> captioned \"Mafia Emerges from the Shadows.\" He snarled at me and my writer, the fabled crime reporter Sandy Smith, all the way down in the back elevator. On the street he broke into a sprint and headed east for Michigan Avenue. I parked my gear and carrying one Nikon with 400 mm lens- a preposterous F 9 Novoflex- I trailed him from the far side of Michigan. I could see the picture I wanted coming up and I got my picture. I used it as the theme picture of my show at the Cultural Center one year and - truth to tell, a member of the family or an admirer - bought six prints for cash. \"Tony liked the picture,\" she told my rep. \r\n\r\n