From the Vault of Art Shay: A Love Story from the Greatest Generation
By Art Shay in News on Nov 30, 2011 8:00PM
This is the 18 year old beauty I fell for at Camp Winston in 1940. (© Art Shay)
In 1947 my transport plane, flying blind at 260 in a snowstorm, miraculously crash-landed on the only snowbank for miles around, at the edge of a 1,500-foot drop. (Photo by Art Shay © \<i\>The Saturday Evening Post\<\/i\>)
When \<i\>Life\<\/i\> magazine made me head of the San Francisco Bureau in 1948, Florence, daughter Jane and I lived on a lovely begonia ranch in San Rafael, CA. Rent: $125 a month. We had to leave San Francisco in a couple of months, when I tangled horns with Dewey\'s VP candidate, Earl Warren. He had \"voted\" for 7 different cameras. I held the voting booth curtain six inches open for my fotog to get the picture of him voting the 8th time, for real. Warren came storming out of the booth lecturing us on the privacy of the ballot. \<i\>Life\<\/i\> shipped me to Chicago. A year later I left to take my own pictures. I hadn\'t made any friends amongst the New York editors by predicting that Truman would skunk Dewey in a landslide, according to my interviews of longshoremen. . (© Art Shay)
Florence bringing lastborn Steve back home from hospital in 1959. Jane (the tall daughter in background) became the first law student in U.S. history to win a case in the U.S. Supreme Court. She is currently 2011 \"Woman of Achievement\" in Century City, CA. Her specialties: patents, trademarks, intellectual property. She once guided my own lawyers, earning me lots of money from The Supremes, who used 11 of my \<i\>Life\<\/i\> pictures in a Diana Ross book without permission. (© Art Shay)
Hiding 5 or 6 cameras in our coats and luggage, Florence (my cover moll) and I pause in our doorway en route to staking out the Vegas Mafia. Her innocent looking purse, with robot camera lens peeping out, snared the then-head of Cleveland\'s mafia, Moe Dalitz. (© Lauren Shay)
I used to do some of my 50 Mafia stories for the venerable \<i\>Saturday Evening Post\<\/i\>. This was the picture of me \"supporting\" my family in my backyard. Around my neck is a brand new Nikon 250-exposure sequence camera, modeled on the old Luftwaffe Leicas that I used to shoot down. (Well, I have credit for one from the nose turret of Sweet Sue!) (© Art Shay)
Florence, posing as an accident victim in ambulance, for a Blue Cross book jacket. (© Art Shay)
Here is the eyrie in which most of Florence\'s past 34 years have been spent â amongst her beloved books, within the ambit of her several \"book ladies\" who steer interesting customers to her â who put interesting questions about books or anything to her. Rich ladies all, who love books and work for her at pittance wages because they love books, too. One of them, Ann, has built her own rare book collection taking some books for some wages. Simone was thrilled when our rocker friend Billy Corgan comped tickets for her daughter and son-in-law as he toured Washington, D.C. on his recent tour. He took the thrilled young couple backstage, too. Heidi runs the ship when Florence is away or ill, and runs the computers as if they were extensions of her voluminous heart. (© Art Shay)
Florence and I at a book signing for my book on my friend, Nelson Algren. (© Art Shay)
When they were sitting Illinois governors Jim Edgar (pictured) and Jim Thompson (an old handball partner of mine) were two dead honest politicians. They used to visit Florence\'s bookstore, gubernatorial limos parked outside, and pretend to search for intellectual political tracts when their hearts were really focused on finding books they had loved in their boyhoods: \<i\>The Rover Boys\<\/i\>; \<i\>Baseball Joe\<\/i\>; \<i\>Bomba, the Jungle Boy\<\/i\>; \<i\>Tarzan\<\/i\>; and the inventive polymath Tom Swift. (My own old favorite. I do believe I became a flyer in the war because of Tom Swift\'s lucubrations.) (© Art Shay)
Joseph Heller exchanged letters with Florence: he said hers were wonderful. So I got them together at a Chicago book signing and he autographed her copies of \<i\>Catch 22\<\/i\> â and then kissed her. (© Art Shay)
Many a Chicago Bull collected rare books with Florence\'s guidance, especially B.J. Armstrong, who liked philosophy books and liked to discuss them with Florence. It\'s always been Florence\'s dream to have a salon in her shop. \<a href=\"http://chicagoist.com/2011/10/19/from_the_vault_of_art_shay_my_new_f.php\"\>In a recent blog\<\/a\> I showed you Billy Corgan at the harpsichord, composing a tune for Florence to dance to, or at least sway. Here, at his piano, he tries a new melody on her. He voluntarily did a 15-minute reminiscence for Montrose Pictures\' upcoming documentary on Nelson Algren, featuring 200 of my photos. He was annoyed that we hadn\'t gotten producer Mike Caplan to ask him to do the music, which he just turned in. (© Art Shay)
(Legendary Chicago-based photographer Art Shay has taken photos of kings, queens, celebrities and the common man in a 60-year career. In this week's look at his photography archives, Art reflects on a 70-year love affair.)
I fell in love with a smart and beautiful camp counselor 70 years ago in the fabled Catskill Mountains. We were both 18. I was the camp bugler and she was a counselor who edited the camp newspaper. There was friction between us because she was from the sidewalks of Brooklyn and I was from the dark alleys of the Bronx. Franklin Roosevelt was in his second term as President — our camp bus had stopped in 1936 to let his caravan of prehistoric Packards pass along Bronx River Parkway on its way to Hyde Park. I shakily took the grinning icon's picture with my father's Kodak: FDR in his Western-style slouch hat; cigarette holder aimed to the sky; crutches hidden; Eleanor beside him.
The world was girding up to go to war. News of the Holocaust reached us from the very few refugee relatives we met. They told wild stories of their escape from Germany. What did that have to do with our lives? Florence and I didn't have an inkling that our puppy love and the war would sculpt our lives into interlocking monuments, that we would one day produce children like the ones who awoke to my bugle's Reveille; went to sleep with its Taps echoing in the mysterious mountains across Sackett Lake; and suffered the editing of their stories by a still-beautiful, now-famous woman who would one day edit many of my books and, indeed, from her famous shop in Highland Park, IL, sell books to three governors, rock stars like Billy Corgan, and befriend luminaries like David Mamet, Joseph Heller, Nelson Algren, Paul Newman and intellectual sports figures such as B.J. Armstrong and several other Bulls and Bears.
I suppose I should share one quintessential Florence story with my new international audience: I took her along to shoot Burt Reynolds in his prime for an interview with the great Roger Ebert. As soon as Florence, starry-eyed, said she very much liked Burt Reynold's beige leather shirt, Burt started to take it off to give to her, then stopped. "I can't give it to you; it was given to me by a nice lady of your generation."
"Dinah Shore!" Florence guessed.
Reynolds nodded yes at Florence's absorption, then casually placed his room key — 515 at the Arlington Hilton — face up on the table, and gestured with his chin at the key.
Roger caught the signal and let Florence conduct the rest of the interview. On the way home Florence kvelled, "I can't believe a bona fide movie star was ready to give me the shirt off his back, and instead showed me his room number. Not bad for a mother of four!" I'm lucky she's never understood just how sexy she was. Through the years we've both sadly watched Burt's career never make it past Room 515.
Before (as Nabokov said, talking of subway grifters) I pass out a few snapshots, I should explain that Florence and I will have been married 67 years when our LA-based daughter, a copyright and trademark lawyer, takes us to dinner tomorrow night at George's" What's Cooking" restaurant and smiling George greets us as if we had climbed the Acropolis to celebrate.
Actually, 67 years (more than most of you readers have been alive) is a tough climb but, as you can see, well worth it.
If you can't wait until this time every Wednesday to get your Art Shay fix, please check out the photographer's blog, which is updated regularly. Art Shay's book, Chicago’s Nelson Algren, is also available at Amazon.
