From The Vault Of Art Shay (Weekend Edition): The Rumble Seat

By Art Shay in News on Jan 8, 2012 7:00PM

Art Shay

My Washington, D.C.-based brother Barry (He's on the right; now 71), after reading my car story, found his favorite 1946 picture involving my 1936 Plymouth rumble seat. Barry, a scientist and genealogist, was on the team that developed the communications system for the first Air Force One. Stuart, in the center, last week retired from being co-chairman of TurboCombustor Technology Inc., an aviation company recently acquired by Carlyle in Florida. To celebrate, Stu and Sandy bought a house on his favorite Palm Beach golf course.

Our wonderful father, Herman, left, sired the twins 18 years after I was born. In Russia he had been a counter-revolutionary activist working with a young Leon Trotsky. In America he reverted to the family trade: tailoring. He somehow supported the three shown, plus me and our Mom, Mollie, with a Depression-era career as a freelance factory dressmaker in New York's garment district.

When I was the twins' age I sometimes accompanied him in his search for dollar an hour work. We'd start at the top dress factory in the building and work our way down, usually without success.

When I was 17 and had begun photography of kids' plays at PS 77, I made $2 in coins one day. One of my proudest Depression memories was riding the 5-cent subway with my Dad and secretly slipping a quarter into his coat pocket. He told the story for weeks. "I had planned to borrow the return fare nickel from a friend at the garment union when I reached in my pocket and found a quarter I didn't know I had. A miracle!"

He didn't believe it was a heavenly miracle because he didn't believe in a God who would twist kids up with polio and countenance starvation, unemployment and oppression all over the world. (I still take his teaching seriously.) He ran from the Czar's police and participated in the world-changing Russian Revolution in St. Petersburg in 1905, briefly owned a tailor shop in Piccadilly Circus in England a few years later and enthralled me at age 7 with his tale of taking a tethered hot air balloon ride near the Eiffel Tower. He sometimes lulled me to sleep with his mandolin, taught me chess, and a single salutary phrase in Russian that would, in 1959, on Garst farm in Coon Rapids, Iowa, help me outmaneuver the Secret Service and keep my position, behind a shrub, for photographing Khrushchev — a shot that became Life magazine's "Picture of the Year." Later, a persistent nasty said, "You're not a Russian; you're under arrest!" I repeated my Dad's phrase of greeting for his CO and asserted to the three translators on hand, "I never said I was a Russian." They laughed and I was released.

When I got to Paris, weeks after the war ended in 1945, I took a picture of myself as a conquering air hero in the Tuilleries Garden, Eiffel Tower behind me, approximately where he went aloft, the flight on which, he told me, he decided to come to America, and not settle in England or France.

He never regretted his move.