Down East Books, 2008
Softcover, 112 pages, 50 photos, $14.95
Unlocking the secrets hidden in historic photos
I was 19, watching them for the umpteenth-early-Sunday morning, this time with camera in hand. Two longtime friends sitting in our shore-to-ship dinghy (The Tender Behind, as all our dinghies were named) in obvious debating attitude, smiling, each with index finger pointed at each other. No, they were not discussing legal or medical issues as they oft did, although Socratic references and the occasional Shakespearean quote was to be heard. They were arguing, as usual, whose turn it was to row out to the Ethel IV (all our sailboats were named after my mother).
A grey inauspicious sky hung low over the harbor, not inspiring for a morning sail. Still they sat there, seemingly unaware that the tide had gone out, leaving them aground.
If I only had a good magnifying glass I could, as Joshua Moore does in his analyses of old photos, discover history-identify which of the not-too-clear bobbing masts is ours-pick out points on the opposite shore I knew well.
However Moore brings more than good magnifying equipment to the utterly fascinating 50 images included here, a mere hint of the special photographic feature that appears in each monthly issue of Down East magazine.
He brings humor and esoteric bits of history, glimpses of oddball occupations, old-fashioned machinery. Really grasping the details sometimes partially obscured in vintage photographs, is, Moore tells us, like “walking around virtually any municipality-as much an exercise in time travel as sightseeing.”
Each vintage photo each is accompanied here on the opposing page by Moore’s lively commentary and frequent surprising information that makes this feature in Down East often the first thing people turn to when the monthly appears on their doorstep. The arresting images were found through Moore’s diligent searches through library and historical society archives, probing the depths of the internet, or just sent to him at the magazine-old photos for which the sender often has no notion of the historical reference.
There is on page 49, for instant, a picture of an odd incredibly ugly building with what appears to be a ship’s bow on one end. It is 1897 and beneath the added on second floor lies the great U.S.S. Constitution, Old Ironsides herself with remnants of her heroic past still evident. The carved billet head and bow appear to be intact as well as some of the shrouds still attached to the mizzen, main and foremast. She is about to be shipped from Kittery to Boston, her incredibly awful second floor to be removed, “her hideous deckhouse removed and her dignity restored.”
There is on page 93 the startling disturbing view of a Klu Klux Klan march in 1923 in Milo, Maine. The Klan’s rise in Maine was short-lived, Moore relates, along with other details of this upsetting, but preserved, image.
Why are two nurses sitting (entirely clothed) in a claw-footed bathtub on page 53? Or a gorgeous 1914 Packard convertible with its elegant tufted leather seats, half submerged in a tidal marsh, mostly unharmed from its crash through a wooden bridge? (see page 95). Just two examples of why you will find it difficult to tear yourself away from Moore’s collection.
My favorite-staged though it probably was-is page 41. An ardent journalist, not to be deterred by the cold of a Maine winter, sits heavily wrapped beside, indeed half in, his feet resting on a shelf, a huge new 1882 stove, steam ascending from a teapot over a black burner, his typewriter, a worth Remington 2 Standard over the right front burner. Moore describes aspects of this new kitchen appliance made in Bangor.
“A photograph captures a split-second of history,” Moore tells us. He searches for more than the photographic details, finding, in talking to people: “I have learned that all the modern gadgets in the world do not compare to personal interviews in unlocking the information hidden within a vintage photograph.”
The Ship Shop, a nautical accessories shop in Huntington, New York, bought my photo, using it on the cover of their next catalog. It captured, the editor told me, the joy the two men always manifested about the water, the water life. Shortly after, both men would be dead. I have, though, that concrete moment, a split moment, a split-second of family history.