$135 a week may not sound like much today, but in 1979 it had me dancing in the streets of Ridgewood, New Jersey.
I was in college, studying English but majoring in the college newspaper and the college magazine, oddly enough, called The Magazine.
We were a talented group, if we’d come together as a sports team we’d have gone undfeated.
But for us, fourth and long was racing out of the student center at 3:40 AM with the flats in a box, one-pont line stuck in our hair, to stumble through the doors of the printer and make our 4:00 AM deadline. Our idea of a swish was a headline about the U.S. head-count being, “America Come to Your Census.”
But in the Summer of 1979, I just wanted a job in journalism, and even shooting at a paper that only published on Thursdays and Sundays had me getting up early and showing up on-time.
There were four other photogs in the department, including two genuine old-timers who would cut through the parking lots to a bar in the back and have half a pack of cigarettes and three Manhattans with their Monte Cristo sandwiches every luchtime.
When they came back I’d be hovering over the enlarger, on my fourth try at getting a crappy negative to look like something. Dan would bump me out of the way, grumble about my wasting paper, and nail a perfect print on his first try. Maddening.
But what I want to write about is my very first day there. I got my oh-so-rookie assignment, a feature that was gong to run the week before the Fourth of July about a woman in her 90’s who was still part of the Yankee Doodle Dandies, a group that marched in the Ridgewood Fourth of July Parade with hats and canes and their best bad Jimmy Cagney impersonations.
Dan didn’t want me to go on my first shoot alone, he probably wanted to make sure I knew which side of the camera to look through, so we got into his ugly company Dodge Omni, destination…old lady.
We pulled-up outside a creaky house and Dan flipped me a roll of Tri-X and asked if I could load it by myself. Dan was the kind of guy who’d look at your work, and if he said, “Well, at least that doesn’t suck,” it was high praise.
He leaned-up against the car, lit his 23rd cigarette of the day, and watched as the old woman came-out onto the porch and down onto the front lawn.
I wasn’t particularly good at small-talk then, and I didn’t want to blurt-out something like, “So…Jesus…how old are you, anyway?”
Instead, I did what has felt comfortable ever since. I thought of her as an old friend, took her hand, and told her how genuinely happy I was to get to photograph her, how thankful I was that she’d agreed.
She smiled and pulled a cheap styrofoam hat with a red ribbon band from behind her back.
We exchanged pleasantries, and then I said something like, “Put on that hat…let’s see whatcha got!”
First she looked left, then right, then down, then at the kids sitting on their Sting-Rays watching from the street.
I thought, “Uh-oh.”
And then, Bingo! She reached-up and tipped her hat, grabbed her dress and gave it a swish, and looked straight at me with a smile that seemed to be born of 90 splendid summers.
She moved around for a bit, I burned through maybe half a roll, then Dan flicked his cigarette into the gutter and said bluntly, “OK, that should do it.”
I though we were just getting started, but for Dan, when you had the shot you had the shot, no point in making the 90-something woman dance around in the heat longer than you had to.
In the car I checked my settings because I wasn’t exactly sure what had just happened.
Everything looked good, except my shutter speed was a little slow at 125th, and it had me a bit worried. As it turned-out, that caught just a little motion in her dress. The shot wasn’t stagnant, it had some life, some energy.
I still have that print, mounted to the yellowing board that carried it into the New Jersey Press Photographers contest that year.
Honorable Mention for me, but gimme-a-break…it was all her.
She was a real firecracker, that one…