Carrie Kline: 0:00:01.0 Okay, try that once more. It’s 11-12-13 today in the Lower Meeting Room of the Concord Free Public Library. I’m Carrie Kline here with Michael Kline. And would you introduce yourself with your full name? Click for audio: part 1, part 2.
Audio file is in .mp3 format.
Carrie Kline: 0:00:01.0 Okay, try that once more. It’s 11-12-13 today in the Lower Meeting Room of the Concord Free Public Library. I’m Carrie Kline here with Michael Kline. And would you introduce yourself with your full name?
Ivan Massar: I’m Ivan Massar—M-A-S-S-A-R.
CK: And your date of birth, to put some things in perspective?
IM: June 12, 1924.
CK: And tell us something about your people and where you were raised.
IM: I was raised in Warren, Ohio, just north of West Virginia, and both of my parents were schoolteachers.
CK: And their names?
IM: Their names? Ivan Massar—Ivan Massar, Sr. I dropped the Junior when I left home and became a photographer. My full name is Ivan Ernest Massar, Jr. Now, what kind of photographer would that be? So I became Ivan Massar. And by the way, it was wonderful, because I worked a lot with magazines in New York, and publishers and editors, and I’d walk in and they’d say, “Hi, Ivan.” I said, “Do you know the name of every photographer you work with?” And they’d say, “No, but Ivan Massar is kind of an unusual name, so we always remember you. You’re an interesting guy.” And so to make a simple name that’s unusual like that really worked for me.
CK: So tell us a little bit about Ivan Massar, Sr. and your mother.
IM: My father, Ivan Massar, Sr., grew up in Long Bottom, Ohio, on the Ohio River, right across from Belpre—right down the river from Belpre and just down the river from Parkersburg—just down the river from Blennerhassett Island. Have you heard of that? (laughs) A lot of people say, “Blennerhasset? What kind of a—?” Blennerhasset was an interesting guy, and it’s an island right there in the Ohio River. And in Long Bottom, Ohio, the best farmland is bottom land, along the old river—bottom land, because it floods and leaves all the alluvial soil and makes better farming. And Long Bottom was the long bottom, and this little town of, I think, 300—300 or 400 at the most—people. My dad was one of four people named Ivan in Long Bottom, Ohio. And Ivan is a Russian name. And my father was German in heritage. I mean, that’s what they said—they were from Heidelberg. That’s another story. But Ivan was a popular name. Of course, German and English—a lot of people use Ivan, and in French it’s Ivan (ee-van). So I register in a hotel in France and I write I-V-A-N, they say, “Oh, Ivan.” They put Y-V-A-N, which is a man’s name in France, with a Y.
CK: 0:03:16.1 So he grew up in the bottom land.
IM: He grew up there, one of four boys, and they all remained farmers except him. He went to Ohio University, and graduated from Ohio University, where he met my mother from Sabina, Ohio, up near Columbus.
CK: And her name?
IM: Luna Marsh. Isn’t that a beautiful name?
CK: L-U-N-A?
IM: L-U-N-A—Luna Marsh. I don’t even know if her parents knew luna was the moon, but they named her Luna—Luna Marsh.
CK: M-A-R-S-H?
IM: Marsh—and they met at Ohio University, married, and then they went on up to Ohio State University to get a Master’s Degree. And by then they had two kids. One of them was me. I was the second. And then they had three more. My dad got a teaching job in Warren, Ohio. I don’t want to go into too much detail about my dad, I guess, because he wanted to be a Botanist, and he couldn’t get a job as a Botanist. But they offered a job as a Chemist, and he had studied Chemistry, knew a little bit about it, so he took it, and he taught Chemistry for 35 years in Warren, Ohio. Got to know a really—he was a good Chemistry teacher. They were good parents. With five kids, it was not easy. So, what else you want to know? (laughs)
CK: So she was also a school teacher then?
IM: Yes.
CK: And continued?
IM: No. Once the kids came, she stopped, and she would—What do you call it when you’re just part time?
CK: Substitute, maybe?
IM: She was a substitute. They’d call her for a half day or for an afternoon. So she continued to do that until my last brother, my youngest brother, was in high school, and then she went back to teaching full time. So, it was an interesting family.
Michael Kline: Interesting?
IM: 0:05:48.7 Well, so we all—. There were four boys and a girl, and they all--. Most of us stayed in Ohio. And I—. Very early on, I discovered in the library books by Richard Halliburton. He was from Memphis. And he wrote books like you call—. There were two of them, I remember: New Worlds to Conquer and Seven League Boots. And he went from wherever he grew—. Well, he grew up in Memphis, went to Princeton University, and as soon as he got out of Princeton, he started to wander, and he wandered all over the world. Just a-- He was a—. He had wanderlust, and these books were about that. I’ve read them. A couple of years ago, I got them out of the library. They’re horrible. They’ve not very good books. (laughs) But when I was in high school, it whetted my appetite to see the world, and I grew up with that plan. And actually, when I discovered the photography, I thought, okay, I can carry a camera. I can go anywhere in the world then. I can see the world, and that’s about what I’ve done.
CK: You discovered photography?
IM: Well, in the Navy, quite by accident. I had a little camera before, because I’d hitchhiked to California when I was in high school. In eleventh grade I hitchhiked to California, and I had a little, tiny camera. I took pictures along the way, awful pictures. And then I graduated from high school in 1942. Well, you know what happened in 1941, when I was just beginning my senior year in high school. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. By the time my class got out of school, all of them were in the Army or in the Navy within 6 months. And I didn’t want to be in the Army, so I joined the Navy. And when you join the Navy, if you have a good IQ, which I did, apparently, I had my choice of trade schools. And they had submariner and machine gunner and all the various things that, having to do with war. And I saw on that list photographer, so I underlined that, and I said, “That’s what I want to be.” And the interviewer said, “Well, everyone would like to be a photographer. You have to be experienced.” I was 18 years old. “You have to be experienced to get into that.” I said, “I’m experienced.” I lied. And he said, “Well, fill out this paper. Write down your experiences.” So I looked at the paper, and I put Down Studio, because he had taken my picture when I graduated from high school a few months before that, so I helped him by posing for him. And then also, I delivered The Warren Tribune Chronicle, so I worked with their photographer, really, because I delivered the newspapers, which were full of photographs. So that was the extent of my photography background. And I wrote that on the paper, and they sent me to photography school. (laughs)
And I got there, and there was a class of about 25 people. Went to the Naval School of Photography in Pensacola, Florida. And none of them had any experience. Shows you the way the Army and the Navy works. I thought, I’m going to be in big trouble when I get down there. I’m not an experienced photographer. And they taught us photography from scratch, how to develop pictures. We got cameras that, to do different things. So I learned my basic photography from the Navy in Pensacola. And after Pensacola, I was assigned to an aircraft carrier in Newport News, Virginia. And within three or four months of that, I was going through the Panama Canal, heading out to the South Pacific. So I wanted to travel, but, you know, my idea was to travel and see the world not shoot at people, have people shooting at me, which is what I signed up for, it turns out. (laughs)
0:10:45.4 I was trained to be an aerial photographer. I was going to fly off an aircraft carrier, fly past the beaches that the Marines and the Army were going to land on, and then, overnight, produce pictures to show them the landing site and what they were facing there. In the meantime—. That’s what all the photographers were trained in Pensacola, to shoot aerial pictures. I flew from Pensacola, flew up to Mobile and photographed Mobile, Alabama, and a couple little towns, just to practice my skills, leaning out of a plane and photographing. And in the meantime, I think—. You know, all the cameras have advanced film now. You shoot one picture, and you advance. You used to shoot one picture, you would wind the thing. It would take forever. Well, I think the Army and the Navy developed that fast release, so they put cameras in a plane—a fighter plane—one looking out at this angle, one looking out at that angle, and one straight down. And a fighter plane would fly right over those, where the Marines were going to land, and you go click, click, click, click, click, click, make a whole line of pictures all down there. And then we’d work overnight developing them, putting them together into a map, which we’d then give the people who are going to land there the next day, or the following day. And it worked out fine. And we’re in the darkroom instead of flying and being shot at, which was okay. (laughs)
So the Navy was okay. You know, it was—. It had a lot of influence on my life. It was three years in the Navy, because we supported a landing in Guam and Saipan and the Philippines and Iwo Jima. So we were there at all those landings, photographing and supplying the pictures for that. And meantime, we’re in a battle zone, so different planes attacked us—Japanese planes—and we were hit twice by kamikazes. My battle station was up high in an aircraft carrier. It looked down on the flight deck, and look up when any planes come down. I was to photograph them and so forth. Well, when a kamikaze came down, they go straight up and come straight down, so you—(gunfire sounds)—you hear these tracer bullets coming down. Would you pick up your camera and start making pictures like that? No. I threw the camera down and ran inside, and everyone did, (laughs) everyone who was out there, including officers. A lieutenant was trying to get underneath me once we got inside. So that was an interesting thing that happened there. That’s crazy to have a battle station with a camera. They could have automatic cameras up there to do that now.
So anyway, that was three years in the Navy, and when we came back. Now, a big influence on my life was the Navy, because in the process of travelling around to these different islands and supporting the landing and so forth, we never, you never see the Japanese. I mean, my theory is that war is about revenge. They actually had a poster during the Second World War—“Let’s pay them back for the stab in the back.” It was all about revenge. Well, it was awful that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, but we were going to get revenge, and we sure did. Boy, Nagasaki and Hiroshima—we killed 100,000 people. We got even with them. They killed 200 or 300 at Pearl Harbor. So we showed them, didn’t we?
0:15:03.4 Anyway, the upshot was I turned totally against the war. You know, I thought, we’re shooting at Japanese. They’re not the ones that bombed Pearl Harbor. They’re guys that got drafted, and they’re up there in a plane. And we shot a plane down, and we brought two survivors out the water. I was sent down to photograph them. The first one was as kid, looked like he was 15 or 16 years old, scared to death. I took his picture, but I wanted to put my arm around him and say, “We’re not going to hurt you. Don’t worry.” I’m sure they were told if they were ever captured, “You should kill yourself before they can take you because they’re going to torture you.” And I told him, “We’re not going to torture you.” We had a translator there. He could tell him what I was saying. So I was really—I thought, this is who we’re killing? These are the—? They didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor. Who are we taking revenge with?
So in the meantime, in the ship’s library—. This was a big turning point for me. They had Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, his story of Walden. And in the same book, they had an essay by Thoreau, “Our Duty to Civil Disobedience.” You know, he went to jail because he objected to the poll tax in the south. He refused to pay it, and they put him in jail. Emerson came to see Henry Thoreau and said, “Henry, what are you doing in there?” And Thoreau said, “What do you doing out there?” (laughs) He said, “Everyone should be protesting this poll.” If you didn’t pay the poll tax, you’d go to jail.
CK: Protesting what?
IM: If you didn’t pay the poll tax. It was a tax on—which ultimately allowed them to have polls in the South to keep blacks from voting, reduce the possibility of them voting so easily.
CK: So you saw this book when you were overseas?
IM: Yeah, on the ship. You know, they had a nice little library. It was as big as this, on an aircraft carrier, and here I found Henry David Thoreau’s book in there. And anyway, to say that our conscious—our conscience is the highest law. Our conscience is more important than any law, and if something is against your conscious, you should abide by that, even if it’s breaking a law, which is what he did when he went to jail to object to the poll tax. I thought, I’m not going to do this anymore. I’d been out there. I was a second class petty officer by then. And the ship came back to the States to take on a new air group, all new planes and new fliers, and then heading back. And when they--. We had leave after two weeks home. I went back to Ohio to see my folks and came back to the ship. And when we got back to the ship, got the new air group, we were ready to leave the next day from San Francisco, and the Captain came on the loudspeaker and said, “We have 150 people who didn’t show up, and we’re not going to lose anymore seamen between here and San Francisco or in San Francisco. I’ve alerted the police and shore patrol, the Military Police. We’re all going to the western Pacific to sweep the seas clean of the Japanese.” When he said that, I said, “Captain, not all of us.” (laughs) So I got back to San Francisco. I made my plans. We went ashore overnight, opposite two dice—one for each side, port and starboard.
CK: Two what?
IM: 0:19:05.3 Port is one side of the ship and starboard is the other. They divide it in half, and half go, so half are always on board. I went ashore.
CK: Were you breaking a rule or a law to do this?
IM: I jumped the ship. It sure was breaking the law. We call it jumping the ship. I went over the hill. And--. They tell me later I, if they catch you, they ship you right back to your station. Well, my station was heading West. I thought, I’m going to go ashore, and I’m going the hitchhike East as far as I can get so if they catch me, I’ll turn myself in.”—I never took my uniform off—“They’ll have a long way to send me back to the ship.” It turns out they don’t send you back to the ship for a trial. I hitchhiked across the country—it took me 24 days—and turned myself in in Anacostia, in Washington, D.C., and they put me right into jail in a Naval prison.
CK: What date was this, roughly? Or year?
IM: In 1945. Yeah, 1945.
CK: Before the bombings?
IM: No, that’s another story.
CK: Okay, so 1945 we’re in Anacostia. You’re getting—
IM: I was behind bars for 90 days, waiting for my papers to come. (laughs) I did myself well. I thought, boy, they’re going to send for my papers. They’re on the ship, heading West. It took them three months to get them. I was behind bars. The only time in the Navy I gained weight. They had really good food, the same food as everyone else had on the station. And we had to go out every morning with a Marine guard behind us, behind each one, picking up cigarette butts with a little thing, which is fine—a little exercise. After three months, I got my trial. And I was scheduled to get—. The people in the prison all know what you’re going to get. They said, “You were over the hill for 24 days, and you abandoned ship in wartime. You’re going to get two years and 24 days. You’ll have a general court martial, and you’ll end up at the Naval prison in Portsmouth, Maine.” It’s a beautiful prison, with windows looking out over the sea. I thought, boy, if I ever ended up there, that’s not a bad place to be.
CK: In Portland? Somewhere in Maine.
IM: Maybe it’s Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It’s right—. You can see it from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It’s out there on a little—not an island, but a peninsula. Big, three-story prison. It’s a Naval prison. I had a trial, general court martial. Meantime, they looked at my records. I’d been in the Navy for two and a half years and never had any trouble. I was a hard worker, and I earned my stripes. And they said, “We’ll have him speak with a psychiatrist—Naval psychiatrist.” So they scheduled a meeting with him, and he talked with me. He said, “You realize you’re in big trouble here.” I said, “Yeah, I thought I probably would be, Officer, Sir.” (laughs) He was probably a lieutenant, colonel, or something like that. He said, “Why did you do that?” I said, “I did what I had to do.” He said, “You’ll probably go to jail for this for some time.” I said, “I knew that might happen, and I did what I had to do, and you’ll do what you have to do, I guess.” So he talked with me a while and he said there was no definite sign of psychosis, but there were many signs of battle fatigue. Well, I don’t know what—. Battle fatigue is being tired of being shot at. (laughs) I sure had battle fatigue. So he had my general court martial reduced to a summary court martial, and I had a summary court martial, when you go before and tell the officers what you did. They know what you did—. Three officers. And a summary court martial, you can be reduced in rank—a second class petty officer—or fined half your pay for six months. So they chose half my pay. I remained a second class petty officer and returned me to duty as a second class petty, and I was fined half my pay for the next six months. And I returned to the general poll, and the next thing that opened up was—. The war was over by then, in Japan and in Europe.
0:23:54.5 That’s what I wanted to tell you. But while I was in prison, behind bars, the Marine guard came up one morning and said, “Wow! We just dropped the biggest fuckin’ bomb you can imagine. We killed 50,000 in one city.” I said, “Wow!” I said, “We, but not me. When you say ‘we,’ I’m here. I’m behind bars, so if we did that, I’m glad I wasn’t there.” And two days later we dropped another one on Nagasaki, another 50,000. So I thought, boy oh boy, am I glad I’m in prison. And they returned me to duty. The next post that came up was in Bermuda, so they sent me to Bermuda, and for the next six months, I was fined half my pay. I was paid a second class petty officer—half of that. Meantime, I got half again for being overseas to Bermuda—is overseas—and the officer, the captain of the station, wanted me—because I was an experienced aerial photographer—wanted me to make pictures of his beautiful house facing the ocean. So he got me what they call flight skins. So I got flight pay, which is half my pay, which means I got 70%. (laughs) In other words, I still made a little bit more than I did before.
So my last six months in prison—not prison—Bermuda was running a lab where there had been 12 photographers. They had all been discharged now, and I took over the whole thing. I took over the flying and all the photography for the station. It was wonderful, that six months. And I got an honorable discharge.
Since I was never sentenced to—. See, that 90 days in prison I was just waiting on my papers. I wasn’t in prison. I was just being held until my papers came, so I never served any time, as they say. So I was lucky in that respect, and I’m glad, because I got veteran’s benefits and went to school after that, when I got out of the Navy.
CK: To school?
IM: 0:26:23.1 I went to Art Center School in California, which is the finest school of photography in the world, probably. All of the teachers are professional photographers who teach there part time.
MK: You went to where?
IM: The Art Center School in Los Angeles.
MK: Art.
IM: Art Center. It’s still there. It’s still a big school. I think it’s associated with Chouinard Art Institute, which is in the Art Department.
CK: And this was on the GI Bill?
IM: Yeah, on the GI Bill. Everyone got four years of school. You could go to college for four years. So I went there a year and a half, and then it was starting to get repetitive and repeat their self. I wanted to travel. Remember, I wanted to see the world. So I left the Art Center, and I applied—. Well, I had to go talk with the Veterans Administration. I said, “I’m transferring to Paris, and I’m going to art school,” because Paris, France, did not have any good photography schools. They were kind of old-fashioned. So I transferred to art school. And they said, “Well, you know you can’t jump back and forth like that. You have a year and a half of photography training here, and now you want to go to art school?” I said, “I plan to be a.”—. What do you call a guy who manages a magazine, both art and photography? Can’t think of what that’s called. But I said, “I have the photography under my belt. I’m an experienced photographer. I want to study a little bit more art to be a little more”—so I went to Academie Andre Lhote, well-known academy in Paris—for two years, studying art.
MK: Andre Lhote?
IM: L-H-O-T-E. I was walking down Madison Avenue about six or eight months ago, and here in the window was a whole display of Andre Lhote’s paintings. I said, “That was my teacher.” I went in there, and those people couldn’t believe that I’d studied with him in Paris. He’d long been dead then, but here they were having a display of his works.
CK: So you went to Paris and studied with him then?
IM: Yes. And his Academy—Academie Andre Lhote. The way they studied art in Paris, you come into the class with all the other students, a woman stands up front, takes her clothes off and poses there in the nude, and you draw. Everyone draws. They do that every day for a week. Friday, Andre Lhote comes in and goes around to each one and looks what they’ve been doing. He’ll say, “Oh, tres bien,” (speaking French) and makes a few comments. You look at anything, you can say, “This corner is not bad.” (laughs) That’s the way they teach art. They believe you learn by doing. And he would look at it and maybe make a—. He would never say, “You should have done this or do this.” They never instruct art. You just do it. And they provide the space for you to draw and paint, and you learn to do it your way, not like the professor. And they think in many schools the teacher up there draws and everyone copies him, and they become another little—. So they are against that idea. And there’s some argument for that, I think.
0:30:13.6 So anyway, I didn’t want to learn art. I just wanted the GI Bill. I got $75 a month to live on, and with $75 a month, I rented a room on the sixth floor in the Latin Quarter for $15 a month, and then it left me $60 to eat and travel. And I travelled all over Europe during that time while I was in school. On weekends I’d take off for England and a long weekend, and then go over to—. Well, I went to Hungary, went down to Yugoslavia and to Spain and travelled all over Europe. So it was wonderful. I got to do some of my travelling—the beginning of some of my travelling.
CK: I’m so curious how this is going to turn back to Concord, Massachusetts.
IM: I don’t know. That’s what I’m saying. When they’re saying--. That’s my life—. Well, okay. I’ll tell you Concord. Well, I’ll have to go around about it a little bit to get there.
CK: That’s okay.
IM: When I got out of the Navy, I went to Art Center, and from Art Center I moved to Parkersburg, West Virginia beforehand and started a studio to get, to earn some money. You could earn—. If you didn’t earn a certain amount, they would pay the difference, as a veteran, and we always earned more than that amount. So we had a little studio in Parkersburg. And then went to Art Center from there. And after Art Center I came back East, and I thought—. Now wait a minute. I’m getting things in order here. From Art Center, I moved to Paris. Is that what we covered already?
CK: Yes, and then you travelled on the weekends all over Europe.
IM: Yeah, to Paris. Then I came back here, and I thought for two years I’d really begun a discipline, wandering and photographing and things, and I had things published in Europe during that time in Paris Match, Illustrazione Italiana in Italy, in Picture Post in England, and in Look Magazine in the United States. We had things published here, there, and everywhere. We’d send pictures in and they’d publish them, little stories. So we had the beginning of our careers.
CK: We?
IM: Well, my best friend Leonard Sugar from Pittsburgh. We travelled together. We’d been at the Art Center for years as close friends. We’d both go off on these forays. So then I decided I’d come back to the States. I’ll try to shorten it here a little bit. And I thought, I need to get a job that’s more disciplined. I’m going to get a newspaper job. I didn’t want to be a newspaper photographer, but if I’m working on a newspaper I have a daily deadline, and I have to be at work, and I have to do things, and I have to get the pictures in on time, something I hadn’t done. I really was kind of free in Europe. So I got a job on the—. Oh, what’s the name of it?—Ohio, down by Cincinnati—Hamilton. Hamilton, Ohio—Hamilton Journal-News. I was the only photographer, and I did all my own engravings, so I learned a lot about engravings in a way they don’t do them anymore. But I did photography—. And the newspaper gained circulation because I came up with a new idea for—like a comic area thing with about—. Instead of one picture like newspapers typically used then I’d use five or six and a story on some event, rather than one picture at that event. I think we called it “Among Those Present.” And we’d go to the Lion’s Club picnic and the Ladies Aid Society and everything. People would call us and say, “Can you come and cover this?” Then you’d have five or six pictures from that which would run across the page, each with a little caption under the picture, and it was very popular in that town.
0:35:00.1 After a year in Hamilton, I quit my job, and I said, “I’m leaving. I’m going to New York.” And they loved me there, and they loved me on that paper. And the head man there called me into his office and said, “Do you have a job in New York?” I said, “No, I don’t.” He said, “Well, you know you can’t quit one job until you have another one lined up.” I said, “Well, I can’t line up a job in New York when I’m in Hamilton, Ohio. I’m going to go to New York and see people, see magazines. I want to be a magazine photographer, a photojournalist, not a newspaper photographer,” which is a form of photojournalism. It’s what I was doing. So he said, “That's-. You go to New York, you won’t be able to find anything.” I said, “Well, I hope you’re wrong about that.”
I was in New York one year. I lived in the Village, on Morton Street in the Village. Had a nice little apartment, which I—. Cost $65 a month. It’s now $3,000 a month for that apartment. [Laughs] It’s all gussied up. But after a year there, I didn’t have any work. I saw different people. There were a lot of photographers in New York. You don’t find work there just as a guy who drops into town. And my friend Leonard, who lived in Pittsburgh, wrote me and said, “Ivan, you have to come to Pittsburgh. Roy Stryker is here now.” Roy Stryker was the Director of Farm Security.
MK: Rory?
IM: Roy Stryker—S-T-R-Y-K-E-R—very famous man. And for three or four years during the Roosevelt Administration, he sent photographers all over the country documenting the hard times in the '30s and early '40s, farmers in the Dust Bowl, just everything that was happening, all over the country. He had about 12 photographers. He wasn’t a photographer, but he was a good editor. He had been at Columbia University.
CK: So about what year are we talking about now, when you were invited to Pittsburgh? Are we out of the ‘40s yet?
IM: Oh, yes. This was now ’53—probably ’53.
CK: So Roy Stryker was doing something there. Still with Farm Security?
IM: 0:37:32.4 He came to—no. He left Farm Security. They pulled the rug out from under him after so many years. He says it always happens. He didn’t get any more allotment for the thousands he was spending for all these photographers. He’d accrued tens of thousands of photographs all over the country. They’re now in the Library of Congress. You can go to the Library of Congress and look through all these pictures, and they’ll make a print for you for like for $10. It’s fantastic. And these are all well-known photographers, who later became probably some of the best known in the country.
CK: From the Farm Security Administration?
IM: Yeah, they started under Roy Stryker, photographing all over the country. And he then went to—when that ended, he went to Pittsburgh, because Pittsburgh was having a big, new redevelopment. They cleaned up the whole Point Bridge which is almost like a slum—built all these big skyscrapers.
CK: The Point, is that what it was called?
IM: Point, yeah, Point Bridge in Pittsburgh. And he had an office in one of those buildings, and he was documenting everything that was happening around Pittsburgh. And then that kind of died down. I went through that fast, because I didn’t get involved in that—after a year or two, and he decided I want to do a thing on the steel mills, so he contacted one of the steel mills—Jones and Laughlin, which I think was the fourth largest at that point, after US Steel and—
CK: L-A-U—Laughlin? Is there a G in there, or L-A-U-F-F?
IM: L-A-U-G-H-L-I-N.
CK: Jones and Laughlin.
IM: Yeah, Jones and Laughlin. And he made a contract with them. And--.
CK: So you’d been in Pittsburgh. You went when you—when your friend called you.
IM: Yeah, I went, and I went to see him. He said, “I don’t have anything right now.” And he called me about a week later and he said, “Russell Lee is coming up from Texas. He works with a big camera. And I need an assistant to go with him to help him.” He’s from Farm Security. He’s a well-known photographer, and it was wonderful to meet him. He’s a wonderful man. So he said, “I’d like you to be his assistant. And I can’t pay the full pay. He’ll get probably $300 a day. He ought to pay you $150 a day.” I had just accepted a job photographing Davenports in Pittsburgh for $75 a week, or something like that. (laughs) I called them up and quit before I started and took the job with Roy as assistant for Russell Lee for two weeks.
MK: Russell?
IM: Russell Lee—L-E-E—well-known. If you look him up, you’ll see all of his pictures from Farm Security, all over the country.
CK: 0:40:32.8 So Farm Security was still in operation?
IM: No, they went out, and they--. Roy was without a job, so then he went to Standard Oil in New Jersey, actually. And the first big photographic file of industry was in the Standard Oil. Roy was responsible for that, for knowing how to file a photograph. Every photograph has to be filed about five different ways. You know, if I photograph you, I photograph your glasses. You can look up the kind of glasses you wear, what you’re doing here, and your whole history, and--. It could be filed under each one of those to get—to find you. Anyway, he—
CK: He did that. He got to Pittsburgh, and then you got hired.
IM: I got hired for two weeks as his assistant. Then Russell left, and I was without a job again. He said, “Maybe something will come along.” A week later, he called me and he said, “Ivan, I want you to go into the open hearth and the blast furnace area of Jones and Laughlin next week. Spend three days photographing, and let’s see.” I said, “Wonderful, Mr. Stryker. What kind of photographs would you like?” And he said, “I have no idea. I want to see what you see.” (laughs) I’d never heard of that. Everyone gives you a list of pictures they want. He wanted to see what I see.
Well, what I saw were people. I went around photographing Hungarians, and Italians, and British, and Irish, and Blacks, all the people working in the steel mill, proudly doing their job. A portrait, but—what do you call?—an editorial portrait with them doing something and looking up. A photograph of a man, but an editorial portrait, and it hadn’t been done. People stand back—. A steel mill is a great expanse, and they’d make pictures of that great expanse and very few pictures of the people. So, they had a whole series of pictures from that, over the years, that I did called The Men Who Make Steel. Men, not women, unfortunately, but back then it was--. Later.
So after three days, he really loved what I did, and he said, “Let’s continue three days a week,” which I did three days a week for the next 3 years.
CK: Under the direction of Stryker?
IM: Yeah, Stryker. I’d bring pictures back, and we’d go over them. He sent me up to the ore mines in Hibbing, Minnesota. I spent several days in the ore mines. I went down to the coal mines in West Virginia. Went down in the coal mines and photographed, and I don’t like that. (laughs) You walk in there, and you get on the elevator, and you go down 300 feet and get off the elevator and walk back a half a mile. I thought, boy, all that earth on top of me there. And the whole thing’s going to collapse. I got used to it, but—. And it’s not black in a coal mine; it’s white, because they spray lime on the walls. You can’t see your way around otherwise. The walkways, where you get down in there, they spray lime on the walls, so it made it easier to photograph. So I got some good photographs in the coal mines.
0:44:19.9 Then it ended with Stryker, and about that time—. Well, I’ll get right up to date pretty soon here. Black Star in New York, which is one of the big agencies—Magnum and Black Star and—. I can’t think of two or three others—. They said, “We have a job opening. We’d like to send you to Houston, Texas, and under contract, for maybe three years.” We hassled back and forth over how much we'd be paid. And they agreed, which they’d never done before, to pay my—. Meantime, did I tell you I got married? (laughs) When I was working in Pittsburgh for Stryker, I met Barbara Opton.
CK: Opton?
IM: Opton—O-P-T-O-N—which was a contraction of her maiden name. She was born Barbara Oppenheimer of Jewish immigrants, and she was born in Pittsburgh, but she was conceived on the boat over. And they changed—. Her father said, “It’s too long a name. You’re in school and everyone else is Jones and Smith, and” so he changed it to Opton—O-P-T-O-N. I think Oppenheimer’s a prettier name. I wish he’d kept that. The Oppenheimers a famous man too. So I married Barbara. She was going to Carnegie Tech. She was an actress, a fine actress. We married, and we went to Texas together and had two kids in Texas.
CK: Named?
IM: Andrea was born in 1956, and David was born in 1958. And. Oh, there is another little offshoot here. Barbara went to Vermont where her parents had a summer place. They would go up there in the summertime. And so she left for Vermont. And I had a job in Cuba for Nation's Business. That was before Castro. And. I forgot where it was, the nickel mines or something down there—a couple different things. I think General Electric had a light meter assembly plant, and so I went out to that and made pictures too. I did a lot of things for business magazines, like Business Week and Nation's Business. I think that was for Nation's Business. And I came back to Texas after I was down there for a week. I was watching the television that night. I was going to leave for New York and on up to Vermont the next day. And watching television, I thought, boy, my one eye is much dimmer than my other one. And I hold my eyes over this, and I said, “Yeah, I can hardly—. Dimmer over this eye.” And then the next morning, it was even worse. So I called an eye doctor, and he came in and looked at it. He said, “Well—.” He went in the other room and said, “I’ve got a patient here. Looks like retrobulbar neuritis. That usually means MS. I just wanted to know what you think about it.” He’s calling another doctor. And so when he came back in the room I said, “What’s MS?” He said, “Well, it’s multiple sclerosis. It doesn’t mean you have it, but there’s a possibility that this, the eye fading out like this—.” I went totally blind in about three days in my left eye. I couldn’t see anything. And I called my father-in-law in New York, and he said, “Come up here. I’m going to have a, finest neurologist I can find at Columbia Presbyterian.” So that’s what I did. I flew to New York the next day. Barbara was up in Vermont with the kids and her mother. And I saw Dr. Gurewitsch, and he said—
CK: Any spellings there?
IM: 0:48:31.3 (laughs) He’s a very famous doctor. He was Eleanor Roosevelt’s doctor, I found out later on.
MK: How do you say his name?
IM: G-U-R-E-W-I-C-H—Gurewich. (Actually spelled Gurewitsch)
CK: Okay.
IM: Lovely man. They sent me in for a series of tests at Columbia Presbyterian. They said, “Okay, it’s one of four or five things. Either you have syphilis,”—I said, “Boy, I hope not.”—“Or you have spinal meningitis. You have a brain tumor, or you’ve drunk wood alcohol when you were in—. You said you were in Cuba. Someone put wood alcohol in a drink, or MS.” And they said, “We can make tests for all of these except MS.” And they went right through all of them and eliminated all of them except MS. And they said, “Now, it’s still not MS, because it’s multiple. Within a week or two, your eyesight will come back,” which it did, 20/20. It just faded and come right on back. And they said, “This may happen several times a year, or once a year, or once every two years. You don’t know. And if it does that—comes back—that’s when it becomes multiple. This is sclerosis. It’s something that could get worse. There’s no medicine for it. And you’ll get so you have days of fatigue and not be able to work very well.” And I worked for 25 years as a freelance photographer with that agency, magazines all over the country, and—.
CK: What agency?
IM: Black Star—. They’re in New York. And all the time with MS. I would go out to work in the morning—. You know, as a photographer, I went out to work with a smile on my face. I just love photography. I just love doing it. So no matter the assignment, and some were more challenging than others and more interesting than others, but all of them—. In fact, I was making pictures of something that someone wanted, and someone waiting for me to come back with these pictures. It was really like a—. I talked with a guy once. And he said, “Once you’re freelance, it’s like in the old days. You rode out on a horse with a spear and come back.” They’re totally on their own, and they—. There was a name for that he used. I don’t remember it.
MK: Independent?
IM: No, it was more specific than that.
CK: Freewheeling?
IM: It was kind of like freewheeling.
CK: Anyhow, so you’re in New York at this point?
IM: Well, in the hospital. Then I joined them in Vermont for a week. Then we went back to Texas. Well, you know, my eyesight came back, and I was fine. I had some fatigue now and then. I kept working. It didn’t stop me from working. They didn’t know what causes it, and I thought, well, they don’t know, but I know that in the last three years here in Texas I’ve been running my tail off, flying all over the country, down to Mexico, over to Arkansas, out to Arizona, photographing—very, very busy and not much time to see my family. I have two kids and a wife, and I want to spend more time with them. I think--. Let’s sell this house and car and move to an island somewhere, and we’ll live there until we spend our money, and then I’ll come back and go to work. And Barbara said, “Sure.” She went along with everything. So we started looking around.
0:52:35.7 Well, all the islands in the Caribbean, they’re either so primitive that there’s no medical service or anything that we would dare to go with two little kids. We wanted at least doctors there, if not a hospital. And places like that are tourist traps, very expensive. And then I met a guy who just came back from the Indian Ocean. He’d been on an oil rig out there. And the guy who financed that was a big Texas oil man. He wanted to go deep sea fishing, so he financed this expedition for Woods Hole in Massachusetts to go out there, expedition, and study the fish and the whole area of the Indian Ocean, and then he could go fishing. And of course, that was a gift to science and so forth, so it was a good tax step for a big oil man.
And anyway, Victor said, “We stopped in the Seychelles Islands, and, boy, it’s beautiful.” He said, “I was in the Marines, and I was in Tahiti and.”—What’s the other famous island there in the South—?
CK: Seychelles, did you say?
IM: Yeah, Seychelles is where—. It’s in the Indian Ocean.
CK: S—
IM: S-E-Y-C-H-E-L-L-E-S.
CK: Okay. In the Indian Ocean.
IM: In the Indian Ocean. It was a British crown colony when I was there—a so-called crown colony. It’s a colony, but it’s not quite a full colony.
CK: I guess we’re getting around to Concord.
IM: Yeah, they belong to England. So it had all the pomp and circumstances of an English colony. But--.
MK: You were there for how long?
IM: 0:54:30.7 We were there for a year. So we just picked up and moved to the Seychelle Islands. My father-in-law said, “For you to do crazy things like this, I can, maybe can understand it, but you’re taking my grandson along on this.” He was six months old. (laughs) David learned to walk on the beach in the Seychelles.
So we arrived out there with a six-month and a two and a half-year-old daughter. And we rented a house, $15 a month, right on the sea there. It belonged to some English—. English retirees from India come down there. It’s a beautiful place, very inexpensive, made up of Indian, Chinese, French, English, and African—five nations. We hired maids. We hired three maids. They cost $5 a week. So we hired three maids, so we wouldn’t have to—one to cook, one to take care of the kids during the day—. Barbara was writing, and I was wandering around photographing. And we stayed there a year in that house. It was wonderful. It was really nice. I thought to do that, maybe this will cure MS. I didn’t have any trouble with it, by the way, while I was out there. And it does really kind of occur every six months or so. You get very weak and very—I haven't--. I never lost my eyesight again.
So after a year there, Black Star, which, an agency—and I was still vaguely connected to them. I kept a contract with them, so when I came back I would be under contract with them, and I knew immediately I could earn a living. I could come back broke. So they said. “It would be better to move to Kenya, because Kenya and Uganda and Tanganyika are all getting independence this year, and there will be a lot of call for pictures from those places. So we moved to Kenya, and I photographed Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya and Julius Nyerere in Tanganyika, who became the Prime Minister there when they got independence. And we stayed in Uganda at Makerere College with a couple we met on the boat coming out.
CK: Makerere is spelled—?
IM: Makerere—M-A-K-E-R-E—I think, is Makerere. Famous college in Uganda. And he was a teacher there—English—Hugh Dawes.
CK: D-A-W—?
IM: D-A-W-E-S—and Collette, who was Egyptian Jew. And I said, “Collette, I never heard of Egyptian Jews. I thought they were all Arab.” She said, “Oh, no, there was a good-size colony of Jewish people in Alexandria and Cairo.” But they’re lovely people. And they said, “If you get to Uganda, come and stay with us,” so here we’re suddenly moving to Africa, so we got a place in Kenya for a while—Nairobi. Then we moved on out to Uganda, where we could stay with them for a while. And. By the way, we brought back Josette. No, that’s not quite right. Our favorite maid was a cook, but she was really good with the kids too, and she said, “Why don’t you take me back with you? I don’t have any job once you leave here.” She was earning $15 a week, or $5—. No, $15 a week, I guess, we paid her. We said, “We have no idea if it’s possible to take you back to the United States.” And they said, “Yeah, you can take her to Kenya,” so we took her to Kenya with us, and then we’ll find out, because there’s a consulate there. There was not a U.S. consulate in Seychelles. So she was in there with Kenya with us for a year, and when we left to go on a trip up in the frontier and places like that, Barbara could come along—
CK: The frontier of Kenya?
IM: 0:59:18.0 Kenya. She stayed with the kids. But while we were in Kenya, we went to the U.S. consulate, and they said, “Yes, Seychelleois,” as they’re called, “two years they are permitted to come to the United States.
CK: Seychellois, can you spell that one too?
IM: S-E-Y-C-H-E-L-L-O-I-S, that’s a person from the Seychelles. In French it’s Seychellois.
CK: Okay, so as an employee, she could come.
IM: Yeah. Well not as an employee. Well, she needed a job. She had a job working for us. And we said, “We can’t pay what people pay in the States to have a full-time, live-in maid.” She said, “Well, pay me anything you can. Pay me what you paid in the Seychelles.” I said, “Boy, if our neighbors found out we’re paying someone $15 a week,” or a month, maybe a month. I’ve forgotten how much it was now. I said, “Okay. I’m going to be working. I’ll be back earning money. We’ll pay you $75 a month.” And she said, “I don’t want any of it while I’m there. I want you to put it in a bank for me, and when I go home I’ll have enough money to retire and build a house.” She retired and built herself a house, working for three years on $75 a month. We gave her a big check for that.
CK: You’re back in New York at this point then?
IM: No, we’re in—. We moved to Concord, Massachusetts.
CK: Oh, wait a minute. How? Why?
IM: (laughs) You see? I skip things. I got it probably in there, but it’s too much. When we left Houston, after three years in Houston—. You’ll have to put an asterisk to go back to that. I went back to New York. Oh, no, I went to—. Yeah, we decided we were going to live in the East, somewhere North, in the Northeast.
CK: After Africa?
IM: Yeah, I went back and talked with Black Star. I said, “We’re not going to go back to Texas.” They had to get someone else for Texas. It’s all right, but we didn’t want the kids to grow up there, just going through the whole integration business down there, which I did some stories on down there, which were published—some of those things too. Well, they said, “Right now, you can go to Baltimore. We just lost a person there. We need to get someone else in Baltimore, or Boston.” And I thought, “Boston?” I had seen Vermont calendars. I said Boston must be like—those white-spired churches, and parts of it are. So I said, “Oh, we’ll take Boston.”
CK: And when is this?
IM: 1:02:14.7 Well, it would have been in 1961.
CK: Okay, we’ll take Boston.
IM: Yeah, so we moved back to Boston—drove up to Boston. By the way, on the way back to the Seychelles, I had put away $1,500 or $2,000, because I sold my car when I left. The first thing I needed is a car when I get back in the States. So I had $2,000, and someone told me—British—said, “Go through Stuttgart. You can buy a Mercedes Benz for that price.” So I arrived back in the states with a Mercedes Benz on the boat, and broke and going back to work. It was a nice car. But it cost like $2,200 for that Mercedes Benz.
CK: So you drove it to Boston?
IM: We drove it to Boston. We got an apartment in Cambridge—a rented, furnished apartment—kind of rundown apartment. And it made me feel better when I saw my next door neighbor on the second or third floor was Paul Tillich, a world-famous theologian, was living in an apartment too. (laughs) So we were there maybe three months, paying by the month, and we go for a ride on the weekend or when I wasn’t busy, looking for a place. And we went through Concord. Well, I’d always loved—. Well, remember, I went over the hill in the Navy because of Henry Thoreau—Henry David Thoreau. And I knew he lived in Concord. So we drove to Concord and went out to Walden Pond, which I’d always heard about all my life. And driving down—coming into Concord, there’s an old farmhouse for sale, and we drove in to look at it. There was a barn and a double garage. And I said, “Wow! This is wonderful. Look at this.” And they said—they wanted $29,000 for the barn and the garage—double garage—and a three-bedroom house and five acres—five acres in Concord—a mile from downtown. And they said, “We think we’re asking too much, because we’ve been in this house for 50 years, and we only paid $3,000 for it.” (laughs) So they said, “We’ll let you have it for $27,000.” Before we even—we already thought, “We’re going to take this.” Well, we agreed. We said, “Except we don’t have any money.” They said, “Well, just give us a down payment. Someone else has made a bid on this. And a lot of times people don’t get the money, and they can’t raise it, and you’ll be second in line.” So the fact was we weren’t really buying it. We gave them a bid on it. They would return the check, they said, if it didn’t work out. Like a week later, she calls and says, “It’s yours. He couldn’t make it, so it’s yours.” And we thought, “Oh, my gosh!” And we didn’t have enough for a down payment or anything. So Barbara took off for New York, and she borrowed $3,000 from her dad, from her father—from her parents. And I called my parents, who had just retired to Florida, and borrowed $3,000, and we had our down payment. And we told them we would pay them back so much a month for the loan.
CK: Why did you want this place?
IM: 1:05:57.0 Well, we had two little kids. This place sits 500 feet back from the road. You drive down this driveway into the trees. Everyone who comes to my house—FedEx or UPS or whatever—they say, “How in the world did you ever find a place like this? This is the most wonderful place in the world to live.” And it really is. And I’ve been in that house for 50 years. It’s about a mile from here. (laughs)
CK: Talk about the community that you found 50 years ago. What was Concord then?
IM: I think it had about 10,000 people in it at that point. I think it’s now 17,000, or. They’ve built a lot of new houses and a lot of big houses. And it was simpler then, I think. And my house is getting kind of rundown. You know, after 50 years in a house, I don’t take that good a—and I had a barn. I don’t know if this applies to this or not. I had a barn, and a woman called me 32 years ago. She said, “Do you have a barn?” I said, “Yes, I do.” She said, “Do you want to rent it?” I said, “Are you kidding? The roof leaks. It’s full of junk that’s too good to throw away. It’s just a small barn.” And she said, “Could I come and look at it?” I said, “Okay.” So she came and looked at it, and I looked at her, and I was divorced, and newly divorced. And she said, “I’d like to rent the barn.” I said, “For what?” She said, “I’ll make it my studio.” She’s an artist. “I’ll insulate the whole thing, put up a chimney with a wood stove, put on a new roof.” She did all these things. She’s fantastic. And she lived there for 32 years. Two years ago, the barn burned down, and she lost everything—all of her clothes, all of her paintings, all of her journals. And she said, “Now where do I go? I can’t even afford a sleeping room in Concord.” Concord is pretty expensive. I said, “Jeanne, I’ve just moved downstairs. I just don’t want to deal with the stairs anymore, and I have a little bathroom right next to my downstairs bedroom. So you can move upstairs for now and see what happens.” Well, she’s still there two years later. She’s now 68, so she was 36 when she moved in. She’s now—. No, she’s 69. She just turned 69. And she lives with me, and she cooks and kind of takes care of everything. She’s a really good carpenter, and electrician, and plumbing. She does everything. But she knows the house and takes care of it. Two or three nights a week she’ll cook dinner. We have dinner together. And my girlfriend, Beverly Bringle lives a mile away.
CK: Bringle?
IM: Bringle—B-R-I-N-G-L-E. And I’ve been going with her for 28 years. So people say, “Why don’t you two get married?” We say, “Well, we can’t decide what kind of a wedding we want to have—whether big or small. She wants a church wedding, and I just want to go to the Justice of the Peace, so we’re still trying to decide.” We’ll never get married. People don’t get married anymore. You know, she’s—she loves my kids, and they love her. And the grandchildren call her grandma.
CK: What kind of reception did you get when you first arrived with your fairly young family 50 years ago?
IM: 1:09:33.6 Well, we didn’t know many people. We kept to ourselves. Actually, Concord has a pretty good system of helping newcomers, and--. But we just moved into that house, and I immediately got busy with assignments, going here and there.
CK: In Concord?
IM: Oh, no, all over New England. I haven’t done much of anything—I photographed all over Concord at Great Meadows and at Walden Pond and the meadow in front of my house, which is two or three acres, and that was published in a book. It’s a book of poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. I should have brought a copy, published by Harper & Row, beautiful book. With her poetry and my photographs, on facing pages. They were all abstract things, just little things in the wintertime, shapes of sticks, and limbs, and shapes in the snow. It’s a nice-looking book. It was a successful book.
And the first book I had published was of The Illustrated World of Henry David Thoreau. That was for Grosset & Dunlap.
CK: I’m sorry?
IM: That was published by Grosset & Dunlap, both New York publishers—Harper & Row and Grosset & Dunlap.
CK: Talk about that project.
MK: Could you just spell Millay for me, please?
IM: Edna St. Vincent—now, St. Vincent, I’ll tell you—Edna St. Vincent Millay—M-I-L-L-A-Y—world-famous poet.
CK: One of my favorites.
IM: Well, when she was born, their younger brother—older brother was in the hospital in New York, and they thought he might even die, but he recovered. He got well, and he came home just before Edna was—it was Edna Millay. So they named her after the hospital—Edna St. Vincent Millay. (laughs) I said, “It’s a good think the kid wasn’t in Columbia Presbyterian. Boy, that’d be kind of an awkward name, wouldn’t it?”
CK: I never knew that. Talk about the Thoreau project—the book.
MK: The what project?
CK: Thoreau.
IM: 1:12:10.5 Henry David Thoreau. They did a book on—who’s the famous walking poet, a big—? He’d talk about himself. “I am the world. And I am the eyes of the world.” Oh, what was his name?
CK: Whitman?
IM: Whitman—they did a book on Walt Whitman with all Walt Whitman’s poetry and photographs from different photographers at Black Star. With all the photographers—they’re really good photographers. They had really good pictures. You know, when you put pictures with poetry, you don’t try to illustrate the poetry. You don’t match the poetry. You do something that feels comfortable next to it, especially what I did with Millay. I’ll tell you about that. I--.
The Thoreau book for Grosset & Dunlap—they’d done the Walt Whitman, and they suggested, well, how about one on Thoreau? So they said, “Well, we’ve got a photographer living in that town.” So they assigned me to do the whole thing. So for two years I wandered all over, making pictures, many of which are in that book and many of which I’d made before. And I don’t think it’s a great book. It’s kind of a nice book, but it’s—I like the writing of Thoreau, and I think a lot of—in the book, the pictures don’t relate somehow. However, they sold 75,000 copies of it. It was used in schools as introduction to Thoreau. They’d have them read that. A good selection of his works in there.
CK: I’m trying to understand, I guess, more about how Concord has affected you, in your work, in your being.
IM: Well—I mean—. Obviously here are two books, most of which were photographed in Concord. The fields and the meadows and the woods of Concord are great. I’ve photographed all through those, and a lot of those pictures have been published. And I must say, I’m not really a very good citizen, probably, although we do go to Town Meeting. You know, we have Town Meeting here, where we all vote on—we all vote. Probably, with 10,000 people in town, there probably were 800 would come to Town Meeting. They would decide all the things. It’s not a good record—it’s not really a good—do you have Town Meetings? Where do you live in—?
CK: No. No, we do not.
IM: I think it’s a New England thing, Town Meetings. They’re all over New England. People come and discuss and argue. It’s fun to go to them, so we go every year. And I’ve photographed here and there in town. As a photographer, that’s my life. But I’ve gone out from here all over the world. You know, I’ve—. Now, the big things I’ve done since I’m here, and people—Leslie would know about these. That’s why they know me, the Library and different places, because of it all, big news story. I made the march—50-mile march—from Selma to Montgomery with Martin Luther King. When I read he was going to do that—. We were living here then, and we’d lived in Houston. And I’d lived in the South, and I knew for a Black man to walk across country for 50 miles to protest the lack of voting for Blacks and lack of proper laws—they’ll kill him. I thought he’ll never arrive there, but I thought, I’m going to go down there and photograph that. And it reminded me of Mahatma Gandhi. I think, in many ways, was responsible for freeing India from being a colony of India, because the English stupidly—they had a tax on salt. You couldn’t make your own salt in India. And a lot of people—you know—millions of people live by the sea. And so to protest this, he walked 75 or so miles with a little can, with a whole lot of people behind him. He kneeled down, scooped up a little salt water with the thing, made a little fire, and made his own salt. And the police were right there to arrest him and put him in jail. And that was so outrageous; it was the beginning of the end of the Indian colony from England. They broke away from them—from that little movement. So I thought--. And I learned later on that in fact Martin Luther King did know about Mahatma Gandhi’s march, and I think in some ways it was patterned after that.
Anyway, I did that since I moved to Concord. I went down there and did that. So these things all made local news.
1:17:52.6 (end of audio A 2)
(Start audio B 1)
IM: you want to change the--?
CK: 0:00:04.7 Track two, we’re on now. I’m loving this. I can’t even tell you how much.
IM: Well, I’m just touching on—now, the other big thing I’ve done in Concord—you say to talk about Concord. I lived in Concord when I did this. As you know, I turned totally—I'm totally against war. I mean, what we’re doing in Afghanistan and Iraq, these were all dumb things. We killed a lot of people, and a lot of Americans were killed. We had no business being there. You know, we’re just going to rule the world. We’ve got the biggest, strongest army, and we have to use it. So far Obama hasn’t done that. He’s really held back from what might have become a war with George Bush or previous presidents.
But I read in The New York Times—actually, I was up in Vermont at my in-laws’ place at Christmastime. And I read in The New York Times that there was a group of Quakers from Philadelphia that—the Quaker’s traditionally—they oppose all war. They won’t go into the Army. They are conscientious objectors. But they help the injured on both sides. They help the injured on both the enemy and their friends. So they had been sending medicine to South Vietnam, which we were in war with and now we were allies with, fighting North Vietnam. They’d sent a lot of medicine to them, and now they were sending some to North Vietnam. But the government forbid them to do this. And they said, “We always--.You’re making us partisan. We’re not partisan. We’re trying to help the injured. And we’re going to get this medicine to North Vietnam one way or the other.” And so the government froze their bank account, and they froze their bank account in Canada. They were going to send it through Canada. So there was a guy living in Hiroshima—actually was in Misaki, in Japan—Earl Rettles, who was a Quaker, who had sailed around the world in his little 45-foot catch, so he was a very experienced sailor. They contacted him and said, “Would you take the medicine there if we bring it to Japan? Will you sail to Vietnam and take the medicine to Vietnam for us—to North Vietnam?” He said, “Sure, bring it over.”
0:02:47.7 So I flew over there. Well I saw this in the paper, and I called the Quaker Action Group in Philadelphia, and I said, “Are the crew members all selected for this?” And they said, “We’re having a meeting this Sunday. We have about 25 applicants.” And I said, “Can you use another applicant?” And they said, “Sure.” I said, “Are these all Quakers?” They said, “For the most part, they’re Quakers, yes.” I said, “So will you consider a non-Quaker?” They said, “Sure. We’re not selecting on a basis of religion.” And so I went down there, and I made a presentation. I said, “I spent two years at sea in the Pacific.” Most of the people that were applicants had never been on a boat, probably. “So I’m an experienced sailor.” I didn’t mention it was on an aircraft carrier not a 45-foot catch, but they knew that. “And I speak French,” which they speak in Vietnam. “And I’m not a Quaker, but I’m a friend, so I hope you’ll consider me a friend of a Society of Friends.” So they voted—had a vote—and I was one of the crew members.
CK: I’m not a Quaker, but I’m a friend?
IM: (laughs)
CK: A friend of Friends, in other words.
IM: Yeah, I’m a friend. I hope you’ll consider me a friend. And they voted me in. I flew to Japan, boarded the ship in Misaki.
CK: M-A-S-A-K-I?
IM: M-Y-S-A-K-I. (Misaki) It’s a sizable port outside of Tokyo, one of the big ports.
CK: So you flew to there.
IM: We boarded—five crew members—four crew members and the captain—and we sailed down through the Inland Seas of Japan. I never heard of them. They’re like our Great Lakes. Instead of going around Japan, we went right down through it at an angle and went to Hiroshima, is where we wanted to go, because they’re Quaker. They wanted to pay their respects to Hiroshima. And we picked up the medicine in Hiroshima from an American drug company who didn’t know where we were going to go with it. (laughs) We didn’t mention to them. But we went out to the—there’s a symbolic thing. The one thing that survived in Hiroshima was a little church spire. They made that into a little symbolic remembrance of that time when those 50,000 people were killed. So we went out there and had a silent vigil there for 50 minutes or a half an hour. And we went on from there, on down to Hong Kong. Then we went into to see the consulate at Hong Kong. And, “We’re here to report our voyage.” It’s standard to do that. You report to the American consulate where you are, the size of your ship, what you have on board and the members. We gave them the name of all the crew, and we have $10,000 worth of medicine. They said--. The consulate in Hong Kong said, “If you do this—it’s forbidden for travel to North Vietnam—you’ll be tried for trading with the enemy.” Well, we weren’t trading anything. We were giving them a gift. We were giving them $10,000 worth of medicine, paid for by 10,000 people all across the country. So are they going to try all of us?
0:06:27.4 Anyway, we said, “We’re going forward with it.” And he said, “Okay, but I just want to warn you, you’ll be charged with trading with the enemy, and you’ll lose your passports when you come back.” When we returned to the States, they took our passports away from us. And about a week later—actually, I had mine returned because the Unitarians, they wanted me to go to Transylvania to photograph Transylvania, which is where Unitarianism originated. So I spent three weeks there, wandering all over. That’s in—where is Transylvania? Is it Bulgaria, or?
MK: Romania?
IM: Maybe it’s Romania.
MK: I’m just guessing.
IM: I think it might be Romania. It’s northern—in the mountains of Romania is Transylvania. And in the Transylvania Mountains are the Unitarians. They’re all Hungarian, because they were a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which lost that part of their thing and lost to Bulgaria. And so they’re all trapped in Bulgaria though they’re all Hungarians; and they’re Unitarians. Most of the country is Catholic. So they still speak Hungarian. It’s a beautiful country. I was there for three weeks, wandering all over—the thing I like to do, wander. And they did a whole magazine of maybe 50 of those pictures, a really nice magazine. I should have brought some of these things down here, but you were just going to talk. We weren’t going to look at things.
CK: I’m very eager to see your work. I'll be looking for it. I’m just thinking—I mean, you’ve wandered, travelled, documented, preserved in so many places. And what does this little town mean to you in the context of all that? Anything at all?
IM: I love Concord. It’s a small town. It’s all good people. They have this Town Meeting. I love Manhattan. I go there maybe once a year, go to the museums and different things, but I love living in a small town, and not so much traffic. And after all, I’m a small-town boy. I grew up in Warren, Ohio.
CK: You could live in Nyack, New York. You could live in lots of small towns.
IM: Well, that’s true. Well, I like living in the town where Thoreau lived. I used to walk around Walden Pond frequently. It’s about a mile and a half walk. It’s a nice walk, but I don’t make it anymore. But it’s a nice town, really good people. That’s probably true of every little town like this. You live in a little bigger town. How big is your town?
CK: About 9,000.
IM: 0:09:37.4 Oh, it is? What’s the name of it?
CK: Elkins, West Virginia.
IM: I don’t know why I know of Elkins. I probably was up there on some kind of a job.
CK: There’s got to be something special about Concord. I don’t think Concord is like every other town.
IM: Everyone who comes here says that. Even the downtown area, it’s a pretty little—they don’t allow any neon signs. They don’t allow any big box companies to come in here. There’s some out on the outskirts of town, but none in town. So they're trying to maintain the historical district. They’re failing at it, because a lot of the stores have disappeared, and they’re having little stores for tourists and things are—the downtown isn’t as nice as it used to be, but it’s a nice, simple town. It’s quiet, and. Well, if you travel—I travel a lot and have been all over the place. It’s nice to come back to a nice, quiet place.
CK: I’m starting to feel that Concord wouldn’t be Concord without you.
IM: Well, I don’t know. Locally, we’re probably considered radicals, because my wife—or my ex-wife, Barbara, she went South, took a bus ride down there with CORE to Jackson, Mississippi, and had a mother’s march. And they carried signs saying, “If you hurt my child”—they were mostly Blacks in the march; she was with the others, and—“If you hurt my child, you hurt all children everywhere.”
CK: You’re talking about the Congress on Racial Equality?
IM: Yeah.
CK: You hurt my child, you hurt children everywhere?
IM: Yeah. And they were all arrested for, as molesting the peace, and put in jail. And her father was in Germany—no, he was in Paris. He said he was on the sidewalk cafe, got The Herald-Tribune, and sat down with his coffee to read The Herald-Tribune. On the front cover is a picture of Barbara being carried off to jail in Jackson, Mississippi. (laughs) It made the AP wire, and it was in The Herald-Tribune. So he called me from Paris. He said, “You know where Barbara is?” I said, “Yeah, I know. She didn’t tell you beforehand, thought you would worry.” He said, “Well, I do worry. You think she’s all right?” “Yeah, she’s okay. She’ll be back soon.” They didn’t keep her very long, so she came home, and. But that made the papers here, so we’re considered radicals. And I’ve done some of these things. I guess I am a radical, do you suppose? (laughs)
CK: I wouldn’t trade you. I wouldn’t trade this interview for anything. Thank you so much. Is--? Am I cutting you short? Is--?
IM: 0:12:44.8 No, I’m trying to think, is there anything else about Concord I should tell you. We were going to talk about Concord. Well, it’s all about Concord, because it’s always going out from here. This has been my home, but this has been my base, and my children have grown up here. And then they leave and go--. David lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. He’s a filmmaker. He does movies. And Andrea and Ben—let’s see—you’re supposed to be profligate and inhabit the earth. Or how does that go?
MK: Multiply.
IM: Multiply and inhabit the earth.
CK: That used to be the case, anyway—used to be.
IM: Well, we didn’t inhabit it very much. I have three granddaughters, so we gained one—had two kids, now I have three grandchildren.
CK: Named?
IM: Andrea, David, and Ben. That’s kind of another story. I don’t know if you want it for this, but. Andrea was 42 and never met anyone. She went to Columbia University in New York, and from there to—what’s the one in Missouri?—University of Missouri. She got a Master’s Degree from University of Missouri, and went on to Tucson, Arizona, and got a Doctor’s in—not geria—what is the Noam Chomsky—language?
MK: Linguistics?
IM: Linguistics—she got a Doctorate in Linguistics. She said, “I’m 42 years old, Dad, and I want children.” I said, “Why don’t you get--?” She said, “I never met anyone I could marry.” And she said, “I just want to tell you, I’m going to go ahead and plan a child. I have a friend I knew in college. We discussed this. He said he would help me. He’s now divorced, living in Denver.” She was in Tucson. And she called him and said, “Well, remember what we discussed in college?” He was married then. Now he’s divorced. She said, “Well, I’m ready. I’m going to try to do this in the next year now, before--.” She had the baby when she was 43. So he came down here for six months and helped her, and she got pregnant. And Ben was born. So Ben is now 15, and he plans to go to MIT. And I wouldn’t be surprised that he does. He’s an amazing kid. You know, and it’s hard to be a lone mother, to raise him by herself, but he’s a really, really a bright kid. He reads everything he can get his hands on and studies everything about computer stuff, and so you never know about—I told, “You know Ben, a lot of people want to get into MIT,” but we’ll see.
CK: He might be spending some time in Concord too, maybe.
IM: (laughs) We see him time to time. He’s really a nice kid. He’s 15. He’s almost as tall as I am now.
CK: Well, he’s got a fabulous grandfather, from my perspective. I thank you very much.
IM: Oh, thank you. This has been a pleasure. And--. You must--. It’s interesting; you meet people all over the country, don’t you?
CK: Oh, yeah.
0:16:24.0 (end of audio B1)
