From The Vault Of Art Shay: It's The End Of The World ... Again

By Art Shay in News on Dec 19, 2012 5:00PM

Equipped for The End, I was grimly prepared for anything.

It took some coaxing for Mrs. Martin , wearing geranium, to let me in from my dangerous vantage point on a ladder outside her window. She asked an intelligent question: With the world ending how will \<em\>Life\<\/em\> publish the story? I revealed to her a staff secret. If \<em\>Life\<\/em\>\'s life on earth ended we would go to Mars. That took the dour, prayerful expression off their 1955 faces. They were all invested in a planetary move. Quixotically, when I talked my way in and they wanted to know where to group for their picture, I charaded them just there, under the cuckoo clock&mdash;a great paradigm for our time.\r\n

1955: The streets of our city were crawling with talismans of doom for dedicated readers of giant tablets.\r\n

At the Hilton, quite fortuitously, a young Billy Graham did his world-end exercise with 15-pound dumbbells, overseen by the cute image of a \<em\>la dee dah\<\/em\> model on the door. \r\n

1958: When the first tsunami winds rolled in funnelled by Lake Michigan, hundreds of homes of sinners and righteous souls alike were destroyed by the wrath of the Almighty, as foreseen.\r\n

1967: Lake Michigan rose high enough to make the heads of the traffic meters look like headhunter trophies. Rowing down a street or two became as acceptable a conditioning exercise as weight lifting. A high school senior contemplates his future plans on Clark Street. Unless he works for that meter company and is hunting illegally parked vehicles.\r\n

1964: In the northern purlieus of the city, the nuclear winter was beginning. Of course there were other things going on, and Life survived as we knew it until the mid-70s. The emergency solar furnace in my house burned for a decade before we had to replace it. After each ending of the world passed, the country\'s mood lifted and even the markets rose. At night I await the crucial yearly phonecall: \"The world is coming to an end again. How shall we cover it this time.?\" \r\n

(Legendary Chicago-based photographer Art Shay has taken photos of kings, queens, celebrities and the common man in a 60-year career. This week, Art reflects on another possible apocalypse.)

Every time the World was going to end, Life and Time magazines would call me to get the real story and teletype calming words back to the terrified staffs in New York and LA. They reasoned that the various eastern and western pundits were not trustworthy because they were given to mocking and scoffing, while a gifted reporter-photographer based in Chicago would provide better insight … especially if it really happened.

(Fearing inundation from Lake Michigan—which would make for great picture coverage—they felt secure knowing I had lots of underwater camera equipment plus my combat -ready (one size fits all) oxygen and gas masks I had brought home from WWII that I had to reclaim from my adventurous kids and their Halloween stashes.)

To ask me how Time Inc, should cover the various events involved, like living in a wicked city, they were especially interested in the Second Coming of Jesus- and I soothed all fears at least three separate times. They planned to give Jesus a full page whether he flew in by wing or prayer and looked presentable; Time Inc. was and is ever conscious of the sensitivity of their readers. They would rather spend a season in Hell than offend any readers. The facing page would have the glorious reaction shots of witnesses to the miracle. The process of the actual destruction-by whatever means—fire, water or divine splatting—would possibly take up six to eight pages of essay space, past the introductory spread. "No blood or dismemberment, please," said the memo. (Time Inc. subscribers read their pages over breakfast which is why, the great editor Joe Thorndike once confided, you never saw ingenious rat trap pictures in Life , no matter how artistic.)

This time, just two days from now (according to the Mayan calendar, which is just huffing into its final station after 5125 years of coasting), the brunt of the destructive force will be 65 percent tsunami, 22 percent fire and 13 percent incalculable wind. I imagine umbrellas blown inside out on Michigan Avenue with cute blondes hanging on trying not to get blown into the lake; zealous TV crews coursing across the city in North Face gear with the price tags still attached; a dray horse waiting patiently as flood police try to right his cart; pastry chef Gale Gand handing out darling French cream muffins to the fire truck crew waiting to enter the beach at the flooded Oak Street inlet; a Fox News crew with battery-powered blow dryer trying to get Donald Trump's hair to blow due north, to be included in their frame of Trump Tower. Sights far more dramatic than the ones my archivist Erica, has pulled up for you from other world endings, below.

Chicagoist readers, rest assured, I plan to cover every end of the world that occurs in my dwindling lifetime.

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.