History everywhere you look

First Free Press, Apr. 4, 1887.

The Free Press will soon be celebrating it's 125th anniversary of providing news and information to southern Minnesota. I know, that sounds like a gimmick, but it's real, and once that number sinks in a bit its significance will hit.

That's a long time. That time frame spans two centuries. It spans every United States president from Grover Cleveland to Barack Obama. It spans more history than I can imagine.

The Free Press itself is steeped in Mankato's history. Its staff has covered literally every major event in Mankato for the last 125 years, not to mention major state and national events. Looking through old copies of the Free Press is like going back in time, literally. The yellowed pages of old copies of the paper hold a trove of details about Mankato's past, on every page from A1 to Classifieds.

The seminal publication actually was the Independent which began in 1857. Six years later, it was bought by Charles Slocum and named the Mankato Union. Then in 1880 the Union and its rival Mankato paper, the Record, merged and became the Mankato Weekly Free Press. It ran as a weekly until Apr. 4, 1887 when editor L.P. Hunt published the first daily issue. Hunt's name still adorns a stone in Jackson Park that marks where the original building that housed the Free Press once stood.

While the current Free Press building hasn't been here as long as the paper it still contains much of the history of the Free Press, and of the newspaper publishing industry in general. I started a personal project a couple of years ago to photographically explore some of that history.

Truth be told, it started on a slow Saturday afternoon when I set out to photograph some of the worn and heavily used items in the building. I work nearly every Saturday, and the Free Press building is fairly quiet on the weekends. During some time between assignments I started exploring some of the nooks and crannies of the building, taking a few pictures along the way. Newspaper employees are generally pack rats: You never know when you might need something. Many of the items I found and photographed not only show some of the Free Press' history but show how hard it can be to publish a daily newspaper for 125 years.

L.P. Hunt said it well in a note to readers in that first daily issue. "The labor incident to getting out the initial number of a daily paper is vastly more trying than people not familiar with newspaper work and worry are aware of or can be devised of."

I've had some fun doing this, and I'm still having fun. I look forward to having some more time this spring to do some more exploring. I've found areas of the building that hold some fantastic history largely unseen even by most employees of the Free Press. I think these pictures not only show history, but the incessant march of time. I think they illustrate how much the newspaper business has changed over the years, changed but remained the same in some ways (hopefully not resulting in its demise!).

Until then, I'll post a few pictures every couple of days from what I've shot so far. I hope you enjoy them.

Free Press staff from 1935.

Newspapers at the end of the press run.

Typewriter keys.

At the State Wrestling Tournament

I've always admired high school wrestlers' dedication and determination. Once a wrestler is out there on the mat, success or failure rests only with him.
The pinnacle of a high school wrestler's success is to win a championship match at the Minnesota State High School Wrestling Tournament in St. Paul.
Anyone who has attended one as a spectator will agree that the whole event is pretty exciting, particularly in the opening rounds when eight matches are going on at the same time on the arena floor.
But as a photographer with a few miles on his odometer _ a conservative estimate is that I've shot more than 30 opening sessions of the Minnesota State High School State Wrestling Tournament_ the whole event is exhausting.
Since our readers come from a wide area, we are charged with photographing a representative sample of athletes from area schools.
During the quarterfinal rounds of the Class A and Class AA matches, I shot photographs of no less than two dozen matches that were selected by our sports editor to be highlighted in our tournament coverage.
Keeping an eye on the status of the various matches and getting photographs of them is a daunting task, particularly when two are happening at the same time.
It's always nice when the last match concludes...kind of like when the pain from hitting one's thumb with a hammer finally subsides.
The Minnesota State High School League rides herd on the whole affair, including the issuance of press credentials.
I never realized there were so many newspapers in Minnesota. I understand that state tournaments are a pretty big deal with weekly papers wanting to report on the tournament success of their local kids.
But each year, there seems to be more photographers sporting MSHSL-issued photographers' credentials hanging from belt loops and buttonholes, all competing for a little elbow room along the sidelines.
Where photographers can or cannot be to take photographs frequently becomes a moving target and rarely does a tournament go by where, despite my best efforts, I'm not scolded by a MSHSL official for being somewhere I shouldn't be.
But despite the congestion and confusion, I'm the eyes of for all of our readers who can't be at the event. I'm expected to come back with the goods.
That sometimes requires being a bit gruff, sometimes a bit rude, to elbow a little bit of shooting room out of the crowds of other shooters.
It's tough, challenging work and even after more than 30 tournaments, hasn't gotten any easier.
Having said that, evidently the job of shooting the state wrestling tournament has become child's play judging by the youthful appearance of some shooters who were sporting official MSHSL media credentials at this year's event.

Hazardous Duty

Monday afternoon was a day filled with crashes and spin-outs as area residents had to re-acquaint themselves with how to drive on slippery roads.
Gosh, but we have short memories.
And I'm always amazed at how some folks believe that four-wheel-drive trumps a little common sense and caution.
The calls starting come in over the scanner about mid-afternoon when the first wave of workers and students headed home after light snow fell most of the day.
I headed out to one such incident just north of Mankato on Highway 169 where, according to reports, a car skidded across the median into the opposite lane, struck another vehicle, then rolled.
The driver suffered minor injuries but it certainly could have been a lot worse.
I had pulled beyond the crash and off the shoulder as far as I could, grabbed my camera and shot a few quick photographs before the accident was totally cleared.
But as I was shooting, even in spite of the slippery conditions and a couple of squad cars with flashing lights, traffic still flew by me way too fast for the conditions.
And way too close, as far as I was concerned.
Police officers will tell you that one of their biggest fears is getting creamed at an incident scene by passing traffic.
I can understand why.
At 60 mph, a car is moving at 88 feet per second. It might not seem that fast for an impatient driver behind the wheel.
But for someone along the shoulder of the road, having all that steel flying by just a few feet away is truly frightening.
All it would have taken was someone to lose control on the slippery road. The federally mandated safety vest I am required to wear at crash scenes would be of little value.
Perhaps it comes with age but I am far more cautious when I'm photographing such events, paying very close attention to passing traffic.
An old adage veteran photographers use to invoke about car crashes was that they would drive 90 mph to get there and then only 30 mph to get back to the office after being frightened by the sobering realities of what they had photographed.
Speeding to news events long since became history for this shooter.
Whatever is happening will wait until I get there at the leisurely pace of the speed limit or existing road conditions.
But all the impatient drivers out there need not worry.
I'll be in the right hand lane.

Farewell Kodak

It recently was announced that Eastman Kodak is filing for bankruptcy.

What that means exactly for the future of the company remains to be seen but I couldn't help but regard the news with some sadness.

In the course of shooting photographs over the last 45 years, I've burned through thousands of rolls of good old Kodak film in the familiar yellow box.

Indeed, during the summer of 1973, while working as a summer intern at the Dubuque Telegraph Herald in Dubuque, Iowa, I made of point of just tossing every box, data sheet and film cassette over my shoulder and into the backseat of my full-sized Ford, just to see how many rolls I would end up shooting over the summer. I don't recall the exact number of rolls but when my 10-week internship ended, the backseat was level to the windows with them.

What is so remarkable is that for all of the rolls of Kodak film I have shot over the years, I can recall only two rolls that were defective. Those two rolls had in inexplicable fog along the bottom edge of the three-foot long strip of film. Naturally, the photos on those particular rolls were ruined so I wasn't at all happy at the time about what I still believe was a Kodak goof-up.

But two rolls out of thousands over four decades...that's still a pretty remarkable example of quality control. And I know longtime photographers who have never had a defective roll of Kodak film over their entire careers.

The makers of, say, televisions, computers or automobiles could only wish for such a record.
In the end, for all of its great products and quality control, Kodak was probably too big to make the adjustment to digital quickly, and admittedly, perhaps a bit too complacent about its standing in the photographic community.

By the time it saw the handwriting on the darkroom wall, it was too late. I shot my last rolls of film of any brand in 2001, the time the Free Press took delivery of Nikon digital cameras.

While I sometimes miss the craftsmanship of the old chemical processes, the magic of a print appearing on a blank sheet of paper, I wouldn't trade it for the efficiency of digital imaging. Given the state of newspaper resources where we're all doing much more with less, we couldn't possibly get done what we need to if we had to burn up a portion of our day in the darkroom.

Nevertheless, I hope the American icon that Kodak has been over the last century survives in some fashion.

Especially since I just bought one of their printers!

Not my usual cup of tea

Typically at a basketball game I shoot pictures similar to the one I took of Mankato East's Brett Olson a couple of weeks ago at left. Tight, close in to the action, clean (at least blurred out) background. That's more my style: Get the viewer into the action and make him or her part of the game. Give them a view they may not be able to see from their seat.


I took a different approach when editing my photos from the Austin vs. Mankato East matchup Tuesday night. I decided to go with the picture at right, which shows (from a distance) East's Brandon Kowalski taking a long range three point shot. The significance of the photo is in the background. East is down by three as the clock winds down. Kowalski hits the shot to tie the game as the buzzer sounds. The crowd goes crazy. The team goes crazy. Kowalski goes crazy.


I had plenty of pictures like the one at left, even one of Kowalski hitting a three pointer earlier in the game, that would have worked just fine and would have fit my formula for a good sports photo better than this one. But in this case I felt the scoreboard added to the picture, showing East down three (I do wish I could've gotten the clock in the frame too, but that was all I had). The storytelling aspects of this particular picture made it worth publishing over the others.