Today, June 12, 2020, would have been my Uncle Bill’s 90-somethingth birthday. He was a few years older than Mother, who would have been 90 this year, but I can’t remember exactly. He died in 2001.
Bill was a very private person, so he didn’t often talk about things that were important to him. But his creative passion was photography (as it was for his father, too, my grandfather). The most unique and interesting work he did involved near-microscopic flaws in slag glass or something else. This photograph here features a drop-shaped bubble in a piece of clear glass, backed by pieces of colored glass. Who else would think to do that? And this is just one example.
I scored a hit with him one Christmas* in my twenties when I gave him a faux-tortoiseshell box. He ended up creating some beautiful images like sand dunes or dictionaries by illuminating parts of that box.
He really didn’t care much about how his work was framed, sticking with cheap drugstore picture frames. Once Bill showed me a beautiful series he’d done of dogwood blossoms, and I suggested he frame them as a triptych in some light wood. He politely pretended to consider it, but I could tell he thought it would be a pointless expense.
All this was long before digital photography, when, film being film, you really had to sweat for good results and they weren’t always guaranteed. Bill also belonged to a couple photo societies, and would occasionally place in one of their contests by mail. (I remember we tossed out some second-place ribbons after Mother died.) Since Bill was definitely not a computer person, I have to wonder how he’d take to 21st-century photography and social media platforms like Flickr or SmugMug.
Taken in the back yard of my parents’ house, summer of 1999.
I’m glad I have the charcoal portrait of him, which was done at some Ozarks tourist trap one summer in the late 1950s. The little plaque underneath it, “W W THORSON PHOTOGRAPHER,” was given to him by a friend of his to acknowledge the creative part of himself, which not too many people knew about. It makes me happy that someone did that for him.
So, I’ll be lifiting a glass in his memory during the cocktail hour tonight. Happy birthday!
*After people die you find out how successful your Christmas gifts were. When Bill died in 2001 I found most of my Christmas gifts from the previous ten years stuck in a drawer at the back of the house. Oh well.