Near a bend on the Vermilion River
South Streator, Illinois
I dawdled this morning, taking a walk around the neighborhood. The Circle K gas station and convenience store sells a huge Polar Pop for eighty-six cents plus tax. The price comes to ninety-six cents after tax and I leave the four cents change from a dollar. The change goes into the take a penny leave a penny bin by the cash register. After picking up one penny off the sidewalk a day in New York City and Washington DC and New Orleans and San Antonio, I find myself shocked to be leaving four pennies for the community good.
A penny a day doesn't amount to much even after a year, no more than three dollars and sixty-five cents. My father taught me differently. I’ve told the story of my father and the penny I threw out his car window before now. Like all storytellers, I tell a story a second time or a third time to explain. I also hope to tell the story perfectly and by telling it perfectly, have no need to try telling it again. I could just print it out and read it when necessary.
My father, Edward William, drove me home from school when I stayed late for my yearbook meeting. One day, as we passed the farm owned by Tim Frederick's family, I rolled down the window and threw a penny out the window. "What did you just throw?" He demanded to know. He repeated his question. I confessed. "A penny. It was just a penny!"
"Just a penny? Look at my hand. See that scar? A weld flash burned my hand. Look at it. It took just a second. I earned a penny in that second!" How very Finnish American for him to explain the value of a penny that way. He had known the names of relatives who were hurt or who were killed in Copper Country mining accidents. His father had survived a mine collapse.
I later learned that the Finns saved their mining wages as fast as possible, ate frugal pasties warmed over candles in the cold mines and bought forty acres in the stump lands at the first chance. The stump lands flourished with another growth of forest as the Finns of the Keweenaw built saunas, then homes, then towns.
In the town of South Range, I know Willy Hendrickson achieved success along the Main Street by the railroad station. He owned a bakery and a bottling plant producing Vernors soda and employed a daughter and her husband, Olive and Francis Samuli. However, Great Grandfather Willy came up from the copper mines.
I had the good sense to say nothing but a sorry at my father's tirade. The next week, he drove me home after the yearbook meeting again and we talked about photography, his hobby while he made his way from high school graduation to married life and the Chevrolet job he kept until retirement.
He wanted to know all about the dark room Bob Giuliani had allowed me to use. I had yet to master developing film but I printed most of the images turned into photo essays for that year's yearbook. Accidentally, I had exposed an entire box of paper and Giuliani just shrugged it off after a few spouts of anger.
I kept news of this accident from my father. He would have walked into the school and insisted on compensating the teacher for his loss. I worried about my father, knowing how hard he worked in the factory for his money. Giuliani never mentioned the loss to me again, and I worked many nights under his guidance.
That summer, father allowed me to carry his Yashica 2-1/14 format camera in its handsome leather case on the trails of Philmont, the Phil Turn Rocky Mountain Scout Camp given to the Boy Scouts by Waite Phillips. I remember sitting on a stump, carefully unloading the reel and secreting it safe from light and moisture in my backpack. I sat and looked at a gorgeous lake, blue in the light of noon as I loaded a second cartridge into the camera. I held the camera as steady as I could and captured the lake and a mountain peak arising behind it. I thought of his kindness and I couldn't wait to show my mother and him my images from the trail.
I have no idea where the prints might be today. I know I keep my reel carefully in protective cases and backup the digital negatives to several photography services. I cannot discuss my work with my father now, but I have presented my photography of poets and painters to the photography club at Saratoga Springs. I can only share photography with him today by sharing photography with all.
Yashica 2-1/4 By Dicklyon - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78073097
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