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MESSENGER AT 14, PHOTOGRAPHER AT 18
Aubrey Bodine never talked about what his life
was like before he achieved fame as a photographer. And he never gave
anyone an opportunity to ask about it. A 2,500-word article on his
career, prepared in 1946 under his direction, spanned his birth to
employment in one ambiguous sentence: “Bodine went to work for the Baltimore
Sun (circulation 300,000) right after leaving St. Paul's Episcopal
School.” The biographical sketches he wrote or had written for
publicity releases in connection with his exhibitions or books always
started his life when he had become famous and dealt only with his work.
It is obvious that he was not proud of his modest beginnings and that he
sought to obliterate any mention of them. When required to furnish
biographical facts for Who's Who he exaggerated his education with
misleading dates and made other intentional errors. One could never
learn from him that in many ways his life was as amazing, and he showed
as much pluck, as a Horatio Alger hero.
He was born in Baltimore on July 21, 1906, the
second of four children of Joel Goode Bodine and Louise Adele Wilson.
Henry, the first child, died at the age of 5 days; Seeber, the third,
and Ellen, the fourth, still live in the Baltimore area.
The Bodine ancestors were French Huguenots who
fled to America in the Seventeenth Century after the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes, and first settled on Staten Island. Later some moved to
New Jersey; others in about the middle 1800's went to Prince William
county, Va. It is from the latter that Joel stemmed. He was one of six
children of Theodore Bodine, a school teacher living near Manassas.
During the Civil War some Union soldiers were once hidden in the Bodine
cellar from pursuing Confederate cavalry; ironically, other Union men
later took everything the family owned except three geese.
Joel was 48 and a widower with four grown
children, two boys and two girls, when he married Louise Wilson, then
33. As she was from Washington county, Md., they were married there: in
Breathedsville, June 14, 1904. The Wilsons were well-to-do and socially
prominent. They traced their history back to pre-Revolutionary days. The
bride's father, Henry Beatty Wilson, was a physician, a contributor to
medical journals in both this country and England, and editor of a
country weekly, the Boonsboro Odd Fellow. One of her aunts, Sarah
Catherine Wilson, was a musician and artist. Her grandfather, John
Wilson, achieved passing fame for traveling by horseback through all the
existing states. Louise's sister Edith was an amateur photographer as
early as 1880; two albums of family pictures she took still exist. Two
brothers were physicians. Another, George R. Wilson, was an executive of
the Pennsylvania Railroad. When he died in 1951 he left a crossroads
church near the family home $150,000. The 300-acre Jericho Farm near
Boonsboro on which the Wilsons lived remained in the family until 1951.
There was also a notable character on the side
of the bride's mother. A member of her family, George Scott Kennedy,
married Rebecca Swearingen, whose great grandfather, Van Swearingen, was
a county lieutenant in the Colony of Virginia and was known as “King
Van.” Mrs. Kennedy, according to family tradition, was a woman of
strong character and few words. When her husband died she walked into
the kitchen of Jericho Farm and told the servants, “Clean the silver.
Mr. Kennedy just died.” And when the horses pulling his hearse became
so unruly that the grooms could not handle them, she, without a word,
got out of her coach, climbed up on the hearse and drove it to the
cemetery. Family archives preserve the deeds of both Kennedy and Wilson
ancestors who fought in the French and Indian wars, Revolutionary War,
War of 1812 and Civil War.
In Virginia Joel Bodine had lived in Manassas;
he owned two farms and operated a general store until it was destroyed
by fire. When he remarried he came to Baltimore. His bride, a great
believer in education, felt that if they had children the city would
offer better schools than the country. They bought a two-story row house
at 2021 Harlem avenue, between Monroe street and the Pennsylvania
Railroad tracks. A fresh spring near the tracks supplied their drinking
water. Though it was a workingman's neighborhood, they had a cook and
laundress. Aubrey was enrolled in public school No. 78 at Harlem avenue
and Monroe street in 1912 and attended there for three years.
His father invested the money from his farms in
tenant row houses. Later he supplemented this income by setting up penny
gum ball and candy machines in drug and grocery stores. He was not a
good businessman and his capital and income dwindled. The couple became
unhappy on Harlem avenue and decided to move to Elk Ridge (then spelled
as two words), about nine miles south of Baltimore, where a cousin, the
Rev. Robert A. Castleman, was rector of Grace Episcopal Church.
The Harlem avenue property was sold and in the
spring of 1915 the Bodines moved to a two-acre lot they had bought for
$200 on St. Augustine avenue, not far from St. Augustine's Catholic
Church. Until a home could be built, a large tent was rented and the
family lived in it. Rugs were placed on the ground, beds put up in one
corner, table, chairs and a stove in another corner. For six months the
family lived this way; then in December the cold and snow forced them
into a hurriedly-constructed shed which later became their chicken
house. The father paid $20 to have the foundation dug for the
story-and-a-half frame cottage that succeeded the shed but he did the
rest of the work on the house himself although he was almost 60, blind
in one eye and in failing health. His daughter remembers with admiration
that he was handy with tools and could do almost anything with them.
After the house was finished he did not work regularly because of his
health until World War I when he clerked in the Patent Once in
Washington. He lived in the capital, coming home every other week by
train.
Until he obtained the government job money was
scarce. Though the Bodines were poor their life was not unpleasant. The
father liked to read and encouraged his family to read too. His favorite
books were Dante's “Divine Comedy,” Milton's “Paradise Lost” and
a biography of Washington. He urged the children to learn new words and
to spell them correctly; Ellen became so good with words that her
friends called her “Dictionary.” Aubrey was interested in American
Indians; on his bedroom wall for years was a magazine-cover Remington
painting of a dying warrior. (During this period - 1913 to 1920 - Seeber
lived with an uncle and aunt in Florida.)
After Aubrey and Ellen were sent to bed the
parents would sit on the lawn on summer evenings and the father would
play a guitar while the two sang folk songs and hymns. The father had a
way with him and was particular in his dress. He wore a coat at the
dinner table. When he visited relatives in New Jersey he donned a silk
hat. In summer he wore a white linen suit on Sundays. After church the
family would picnic along the Patapsco River, walking several miles to
reach a favored spot. Mother and father would fish while the children
frolicked on the bank. The Fourth of July was celebrated with lemonade
and gingerbread because, the mother said, “that's the way my family
did it for generations.”
On fall and winter evenings the mother made
popcorn and roasted chestnuts, the father read in his rocker, and Ellen
and Aubrey sat at the dining room table doing their homework by the
light of an oil lamp. The only heat in the house came from a wood stove.
Aubrey and Seeber carried wood into the house every night when they came
home, no matter the hour, until 1927 when Seeber put in a better heating
system. In winter bricks were heated on the stove, wrapped in paper and
put in the beds to keep feet warm. There was no stairway to the second
floor; at bedtime Aubrey climbed a stationary ladder, lighting his way
with lamp or candle. Electricity did not come until 1925.
A cracked and faded photograph in Ellen's
possession shows the house at about this time. The trim white cottage
had been added to on one side and in back. The side porch had wooden
rocking chairs, a glider, and a table and stand filled with potted
plants. Rose trellises flanked the doorway, shrubs bordered the walk and
there was a bird feeder under a pine tree. In the backyard was a wooden
lawn swing. Bordering the street was a row of maple shoots Aubrey had
dug up in the woods.
He erected a flagpole on the lawn. Most
mornings he had the family and the neighboring Pearson children stand at
attention while he raised the flag. This was a landmark. His mother
directed visitors, “When you see the flag, that's our house.” St.
Augustine avenue itself was a rough, unpaved road. When Dr. S. Kennedy
Wilson drove out he would leave his car at the bottom of the hill, along
the Washington boulevard, and walk, puffing, up the steep grade.
The cottage was in West Elk Ridge, with only a
few houses nearby. Ellen remembers fields and woods bordering their
property with a meadow filled with daisies stretching off into the
distance and, beyond a woods, a stream they called the Branch, with
forget-me-nots and white violets growing along the green banks.
Aubrey liked to wander alone through the fields
and woods, bringing back huckleberries, wild cherries, chestnuts,
chinquapins and hickory nuts. With an old rifle of his father's he would
go squirrel hunting, and when he did his sister said that he seemed to
her, because of his dress and manner, to be a Howard county version of
Daniel Boone. The first money he earned was from picking potato bugs in
a neighbor's garden, at a cent a can. Later his mother wrote to a
relative, “Aubrey has been snaring rabbits and selling them in Elk
Ridge to buy Christmas presents.” The squirrels and rabbits he brought
in were also frequently served at the family table.
At Christmas his mother sent him into the woods
for a tree and laurel. She strung the tree with pretty ornaments and
baked ginger cookies and fruitcakes. There was always a big box from
Jericho Farm filled with country ham, sausage, pudding, bacon and
scrapple. The Florida uncle, Dr. Seeber King, sent a crate of oranges
and a box of pecans. Christmas traditions meant much to the mother and
they did to Aubrey all his life. He insisted on selecting the tree and
doing the decorating himself.
Before her marriage Mrs. Bodine painted
landscapes and still lifes. She stopped when the children were born but
resumed when she was in her 70's and Aubrey kept one of her still lifes
hanging in his house, though he never told visitors who painted it. She
was a woman of strong character and, like all the Wilsons, seldom
demonstrative; all had been raised to believe it was improper and weak
to show emotion. She was restless and always had to be doing something,
a trait her children inherited. She was up by 6 a.m. and in spring and
summer went right to the garden to work. There was a half-acre vegetable
garden; this and a flock of chickens provided much of the family's food.
Seeber remembers his father turning the soil with a hand plow. The old
man loved to garden and even when his health was poor he would hoe,
sitting on a box as he worked.
Most summers the Bodine family went by train to
visit the Wilsons in Washington county. They were met at the Weverton
depot by horse and buggy and taken to Jericho Farm's big, comfortable
house where family portraits crowded the walls and antique sideboards
and corner cupboards were filled with family pewter and silver.
Aubrey attended the Elk Ridge Elementary School
from 1915 to 1919, from the fourth through the seventh grade. In
September, 1919, he transferred to St. Paul's Boys' School, then
primarily a school for boys who sang in the choir of St. Paul's
Protestant Episcopal Church. The school was at 8-10 East Franklin street
and had about 30 students, practically all boarders. They had school on
Saturday and Monday off because Sunday was a long and strenuous day with
several services. The boys marched two-by-two in their black gowns and
mortar boards down Charles street to St. Paul's. They sang at the 11
a.m. service, at evensong and sometimes again at 8 p.m. Although
Aubrey's voice did not qualify him for the choir he was required to
attend all services.
He took the semi-classical course, won the
prize for Latin and led the class. Records for that period no longer
exist but school administrators are under the impression that Aubrey was
there about five years. Seeber attended St. Paul's for three years after
Aubrey did and this may have confused memories. Recollections also could
have been influenced by Aubrey's own claim-in Who's Who he lists his
attendance as five years, 1918 to 1923. According to his brother, he was
there only one year.
But St. Paul's always meant much to him. It was
his school. Though he never talked about his school days he was proud to
be known as a St. Paul's boy and to be identified as one of its
prominent alumni. He gave the school a collection of his prize pictures
and they hang in the library. During a fund raising campaign he agreed
to donate an autographed picture of the school to anyone who contributed
$1,000, and willingly printed many pictures. Over the years he received
numerous honors, but one of the most treasured came in 1950 when he was
presented with the school's first annual award as “alumnus of the
year.”
Aubrey's formal schooling ended at the eighth
grade because he felt the tuition was too great a burden for his
parents. That spring he wrote to his father, “If you can't afford to
send me to St. Paul's, then I don't want to go to school.” He may not
have known that his one year there had been paid for by his mother, who
sold her diamond engagement ring to make it possible.
With the help of a cousin, Frank Wilson, who
was country circulation manager, he got a job in the business office of
the Sunpapers as a messenger. He was 14 when he started work on
August 29, 1920, at $8 a week.
Though I knew Aubrey Bodine well from 1946 on I
never heard him say that he had started as a messenger. I was under the
impression, as most others were, that he had begun as a commercial
photographer and had soon-practically overnight-been transferred to the
editorial department because of his outstanding ability. So when not
long before his death, I as editor of the Sunday Sun had occasion
to check his employment record with the payroll department, I was
surprised to learn otherwise. When I mentioned this to him he did not
bother to comment; as was his habit when he did not want to become
involved, he became busy lighting his pipe and then sidled away. Later I
asked him directly, “What did you do when you were a messenger?” “I
don't remember,” he replied somewhat sharply and again walked off.
Some old-timers do remember. He was a thin,
good looking boy with freckles, a thick head of red hair, quiet and with
such a serious air that he looked much older than his years. One man,
looking back, describes him as “a country lad; Relay, I think; shy,
especially with the young ladies. He would often blush.” He was one of
about seven messengers-called runners then-who worked out of the
business department, which was on the ground floor of the Sun
building on the southwest corner of Charles and Baltimore streets. The
boys ran errands throughout the building, picked up copy from
advertisers and delivered proofs to them, went to other newspapers to
exchange advertising mats, and hustled coffee for tips. In August, 1921,
he was transferred to advertising art, as the commercial art department
was then known. Still a messenger, he went to stores to pick up
merchandise that Sun. artists would sketch for ads and then
returned it with the sketches for approval.
In May, 1922, he got his first raise, $1 a
week. The voucher, still in the payroll department files, was signed by
the department head, countersigned by the business manager and approved
by the president of the company. He had now become more office boy than
messenger. He filled the ink bottles of the five or six artists in the
commercial department and filed their drawings and the engravings made
from them. Two different artists remember that he did not care much for
these tasks. When he thought no one was watching he made his own
evaluation of the artists' work. If it was good he filed it. If it was
sloppily done he tossed it in a wastebasket.
He began to take an interest in art. George T.
Bertsch, then a summer employee and later business manager and general
manager of the Sunpapers, recalls him kneeling beside the desks
of the better artists, intently watching them draw. Soon he was doing
some of the drudgery apprentices did. After an artist had lettered an
ad, Aubrey filled in the lettering and did shading and cross-hatching.
Fred Stidman was head of the department. His specialty was shoes. When
he was too busy to do detail work on the shoes he had Aubrey black them
in.
Edward L. Christle was an artist who had
preceded Aubrey as office boy. To broaden his experience he was
occasionally sent out as a cameraman. His main job was to photograph the
new cars for the Sunday Sun's automobile section. This kept him
hopping, for there were many makes then - besides Fords and Chevrolets,
such cars as Hupmobiles, Hudsons, Essexes, Jordans, Wolverines,
Whippets, Willys Knights, Marmons and Chandlers ($995 FOB Detroit).
Aubrey went along with Christle, lugging the heavy case filled with
glass photographic plates. They sometimes traveled by taxi, but more
often by streetcar. Christle remembers an occasion at a North avenue lot
when to show an entire automobile, he had to back up with his camera and
tripod into the busy street. Aubrey was given the job of stopping all
trolley cars until the pictures were made. Before long, though, he was
not only doing such chores but also sticking his head under the black
cloth to snap pictures. Christle was glad to have him do so, for he
himself was not that interested in photography and would have preferred
to be back at his drawing board. Thus it was an artist who did not care
much about photography, or know much about it, who gave the first
on-the-job training to a student who became so absorbed and excited by
its magic that he was to become internationally known for his wizardry
and art.
Aubrey had been taking pictures before this
with his own box camera. Seeber remembers that when Aubrey was about 15
they traipsed through the woods and fields near Elk Ridge on Sundays.
Aubrey would have Seeber run down a road, jump off a log or pose atop a
stack of fence posts while he clicked away. These probably were the
first pictures he made. Seeber has preserved them. They look like
snapshots any boy might make of his brother while killing time before
Sunday dinner. There is no attempt at composition, the posing is
obvious, the pictures are out of focus, and, in some cases, lightstruck.
The Sun's photographic art department
was just down the hall from the commercial art department. Aubrey began
spending much of his free time there, listening to the news
photographers spin tall stories about assignments, asking them
questions, and, when they permitted, mixing their chemicals and trying
his hand at developing and printing. He was not yet 16, still shy, still
blushing, but quick to learn and wide-eyed at the fascinating world
opening up around him. The photographic department was headed by Charles
Myers, who had a staff of about six that worked for all of the Sunpapers,
morning, evening and Sunday. All but two of the men were journeymen who
regarded photography as nothing more than a job; the two who became good
photographers were young and just learning their trade. The help and
advice Aubrey got must have been minimal.
At this time the Sunpapers had also one
commercial photographer, Herbert Moore. Bodine frequently accompanied
him as he did Christle, carrying the tripod and the box of glass plates.
One day while Moore was taking a picture with a flashpowder gun, a
tricky and dangerous device that preceded flash bulbs, the powder
exploded in his face and he was badly burned. While he was hospitalized
Aubrey took over his work. He did well. On November 18, 1924, he was
promoted to commercial photographer. His salary was raised from $18 to
$21.
In those days at least 90 per cent of all
advertising illustrations were made by artists. They drew diamond rings,
silk-shade bridge lamps, console phonographs, “table-talker radios,”
and lift-top refrigerators with golden oak finish. So few ads were
illustrated with photos that a commercial photographer could not have
been overly busy. In addition to snapping new cars and automobile
agencies, though, he “did real estate”-new houses and waterfront
property for sale-and illustrated ads in the photogravure section. Such
pictures included studio studies of Stieff silverware, portraits of
children raised on Western Maryland milk, and shots of corner stores
that used Gambrill's Patapsco Flour (the ads mentioned that there were
300 groceries in Baltimore and implied that most sold this flour). The
young photographer made such pictures six days a week, and worked in a
darkroom “smaller than a closet.”
But it did not take him long to “bang”
children's portraits or neighborhood grocery stores; he had time left
over. So during his lunch hour and in that spare time he took pictures
that appealed to him personally on the Pratt street waterfront and in
colorful downtown areas. On Sundays he roamed alone through the woods
near his home and along the Patapsco River. One of his favorite subjects
was the eight-arch Thomas viaduct on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad at
Relay, one of the finest examples of railway architecture in America.
In the fall of 1923, while he was still an
office boy-clerk, Aubrey submitted two pictures to Gustafus Warfield
Hobbs, editor of the Sunday Sun.” One showed the viaduct from a
river bank. The other, a much finer picture, was taken from one end of
it and the unusual angle caught the eight graceful arches. Hobbs
published the pictures in the photogravure section. Many years later
Bodine, in a rare moment of reminiscence, remarked that this was the
biggest thrill of his life.
Bodine took many pictures of the viaduct. After he became well known
he would ask the B&O public relations department to have a train
stopped on it while he made his photo. The railroad's operating
department raised heated objections, particularly if he picked one of
the crack trains. But he always got what he wanted. He was as impressed
with the viaduct's construction, too, as he was with its beauty. When he
submitted his picture he would admonish the editor to include all the
facts that he had collected over the years about its uniqueness
durability and cost. These facts were seldom used for reasons of space.
But when he published his first book “My Maryland,” he insisted that
the caption on his viaduct photo include everything he had always wanted
to say about it. The information he supplied produced this: “The
Thomas Viaduct over the Patapsco River between Relay and Elk Ridge
Landing is the oldest stone arch bridge in the world. Built in 1835 to
take the 'grasshopper' engines of those days it is still in service;
trains of all sizes and weights have stood upon it, crawled over it and
flashed across it, but never a stone has fallen, never an arch has
quaked. The picture shows the Baltimore and Ohio streamliner Royal Blue
crossing it. Irish contractor John McCartney, when the span was
completed, erected a monument at his own expense putting his own name on
it in two places in addition to the names of the B&O directors and
officers, and other officials connected with its building. The bridge
cost $142,236.51 in 1835. Today stone masons no longer are available to
do this kind of work, and if they could be found, one arch would cost
many times that.”
Hobbs was born in 1876, attended City
College and founded and edited the school's yearbook, the Green Bag. In
1904 he joined the Philadelphia Public Ledger, becoming its city editor
and managing editor. There he started the first newspaper rotogravure
section in the country. He became editor of the Sunday Sun in
1918 and founded its rotogravure section. He resigned in 1923 when
ordained a deacon in the Protestant Episcopal Church. He was ordained a
priest the next year. He died April 24, 1957.
From then on his wooden darkroom tanks often
contained as many pictorial as commercial negatives. The news
photographers, with one or two exceptions, did not take pictures on
their own unless they could make money doing it. They termed Aubrey's
pictures “arty stuff” and teased him about them. In 1924, to find
others with similar interest, he began attending sessions of the Photo
Club of Baltimore, later known as the Baltimore Camera Club, which had
been founded in 1884 and was the second oldest camera club in the
country. Most members were amateurs and many had had art training or
experience. At these meetings, held at 105 West Franklin street, he
learned by listening to lectures and asking hundreds of questions, and
he copied the work of the best photographers. Before long he had enough
confidence to show his own pictures at the club. The first contest he
entered he won. It was a state-wide competition and he got a cup for
having the best set of prints.
Some of those prints were found after his death
in the attic of his Ruxton home. The earliest is dated 1924. It is a
bromide print titled “Reflections.” A man in a straw hat and
business suit is standing on the bank of a pond with a fishing rod.
Trees and clouds are reflected in the water. The print has the
atmosphere of a Matisse painting. The signature, different from anything
that he used subsequently, was almost an inch high. All letters were
capitalized except the “o”; one would read the name Bo-DINE. The
sticker on the back indicates that this was one of eight prints
submitted to the Photo Club of Baltimore and was part of the print
interchange of 1924-25 of the Associated Camera Clubs of America. Some
of Aubrey's entries were mounted on boards that had been used by the Sun's
commercial art department for layouts; ad sizes for Virginia Rounds and
the Koontz Dairy are still to be seen on the back.
At about the same time - while still 18 -
Aubrey began sending out salon prints. His first entry was in the salon
of the Pictorial Photographers of America. Two photos out of four were
accepted. One of these, made along the Pratt street waterfront on his
lunch hour, became his first important exhibition print. It was titled
“Symphony in Reflections” and probably was made with a 2-A Kodak,
the second camera he bought. It was a close-up of a prow of a Bay craft
with the rail of another boat in the background. Mooring chains and
lines were reflected in the harbor water. The print was enormously
successful on the salon circuit. In the next few years it was exhibited
in Syracuse, Buffalo, Rochester, Philadelphia, New York and at the
Smithsonian Institution. It won first prize at a Chicago Art Institute
show and was purchased for the permanent collection of the Art Gallery
of Toronto. On the back of the print, filled with salon stickers, Aubrey
had pasted a few lines from a review of the Rochester International
salon which described the picture as “a fussy and illogical pattern
study of part of a boat and its reflections.” In 1946 in talking about
his work he referred to “Symphony in Reflections” and “Fishing
Dories,” made about 1925, and declared, “I don't think I've ever
done better than those two. I'm not sure that I ever will.” He
repeated that observation to me years later. I personally think that
sentiment colored his judgment and that these two - while sharp,
powerful pictures with strong contrasts and vivid patterns - cannot
compare with his work in the Forties and Fifties.
Joel Bodine died in 1924 after a long illness.
Aubrey and Seeber had been helping their family financially from the
time they started working, but now they gave their mother a larger share
of their salary. Seeber was working for the Wolfe and Mann Manufacturing
Company. He was paid 20 cents an hour for a 48-1/2 hour week. He gave his
mother $5 a week, paid $7.07 for a monthly commuter's ticket on the
Baltimore and Ohio and had a few dollars left for himself. Aubrey,
because he was older and making more money, undoubtedly gave his mother
more. Ellen was still in school but was soon to start work as a
secretary.
The boys walked to the depot in Elk Ridge to
catch the 7:36 a.m. train, which reached Camden station at 8 o'clock.
Except in bad weather they then walked to work. Going home they left
Camden at 5:15 p.m. and got to Elk Ridge at 5.32. If they worked late or
if Aubrey stayed in town to take pictures or attend a camera club
meeting they had to ride a train that stopped only at Relay. Then they
walked the tracks to Elk Ridge and up the boulevard to their home, a
distance of about two and a half miles.
Walking between Relay and Elk Ridge they had to
pass through a rocky defile seemingly just wide enough for the trains.
No one wanted to be caught in there when a train roared through, for
according to local lore the speed of the train would suck walkers under
the wheels. So whenever the Bodines, or anyone else, walking through
that defile heard a warning whistle, they ran as fast as they could to
beat the train out of it.
If Aubrey got off at Elk Ridge he often walked
up the boulevard with his neighbor Pearson, a self-made man who was an
official of a meat packing plant and was not taken lightly at work, at
home or in the neighborhood. Most nights Pearson entered his house
shaking his head and muttering, “That boy!” He would tell his wife,
“Whatever I say, that Bodine kid says the opposite! If I say the
Washington Senators have a good team, he says they don't. If I say
Harding's a terrible president, he says he's not.” Sometimes he would
grumble, “That boy is so obstinate that I don't know what will ever
become of him.” On at least two occasions he was so upset by Aubrey's
restrained contrariness that he vowed to his family that he would never
walk up the hill with him again. Yet he evidently was fond of this
15-year-old boy; when he bought a new Victrola he gave Aubrey his old
one.
All his life Aubrey said and did what he wanted
and he never seemed to care what others thought. One summer day going
home on the train he was sitting next to an open window smoking a new
pipe. An elderly woman came and sat down next to him. She had a small
poodle concealed under her cloak. She glared at Bodine and finally asked
him to stop smoking because it bothered her dog. He ignored her and
continued to watch the scenery and puff on his pipe. With an edge to her
voice she said that passengers weren't supposed to smoke in that car. He
calmly replied that passengers weren't supposed to carry dogs on trains.
Suddenly the woman grabbed the pipe out of his hand and threw it out the
window. Without a word and without any show of emotion, he picked up the
poodle and dropped it out the window. Fortunately the train had been
slowing for Elk Ridge. Both got off without speaking. But, as Aubrey
said years later, the story had a happy ending as far as he was
concerned. Bounding down the tracks came the poodle, carrying the pipe
in his mouth.
In their teens Aubrey and Seeber played golf on
Sundays. They would leave home early in the morning with their bags on
their shoulders, walk nearly a mile to the depot, take a train to Camden
station and then a streetcar to Carroll Park to play the nine-hole
course with its sand greens.
Afterward they took a streetcar back to Camden,
a train to Elk Ridge or sometimes Relay, and walked back home.
Aubrey got his first car, a Model T roadster,
when he was about 18. It was his custom to wash it every Saturday
afternoon and he never missed doing it even in a driving rain. Traffic
was so light in those days that he parked on Baltimore street in front
of the Sun building.
Life was pleasant in the Elk Ridge cottage and
the three growing children enjoyed living there. The mother raised
canaries for pleasure and pin money; there was always bird song in the
house. The garden provided fresh vegetables and flowers. Seeber worked
the vegetable plot, Aubrey looked after the flowers. The three children
made much of Mother's Day, their mother's birthday and other special
occasions. Aubrey bought potted plants at Lexington Market and put them
at his mother's place at the table. He often took bouquets from the
garden to work and presented them to switchboard operators, clerks and
secretaries, usually women older than he was. When he was 18 he
announced one Sunday morning that he was redecorating the dining room,
starting in fifteen minutes. He had picked out a colorful wallpaper, and
shocked everyone by saying he was painting the woodwork a matching
bright green. In those days young men were not interested in decorating,
and woodwork was finished in dark colors. There were objections and even
tears but Aubrey persisted and when the room was finished everyone,
including inquisitive neighbors, agreed that it looked better than ever
before.
There were other family crises caused by
Aubrey's uncompromising ways and curt manner. Ellen gave a party for her
friends, thinking one particularly attractive girl would interest him.
When he walked in she introduced him, and said, “Here's a girl who
came from Baltimore especially to meet you.” Without acknowledging the
introduction he snapped, “So what?” and vanished.
When Seeber Bodine was recounting this story he
added that he now plays golf at the Baltimore Country Club. The Five
Farms course is just a few minutes by car from his home. He keeps his
bag at the club and a caddy carries it around the 18-hole course. After
he has finished his round he can have refreshments or dinner. “It's a
great club and I love the people,” he said. “But, you know, I
enjoyed golf much more when Aubrey and I played at Carroll Park:”
He was accustomed to bring the Evening
Sun, home from work and everyone read it. When he saw that Ellen was
devouring “The Sheik,” which was being serialized, he told her she
was too young to read such trash and to stop it or the whole family
would suffer. The next night he caught her reading it. He never brought
the paper home again until the serialization ended, months later.
At the Sun, meanwhile, he was rounding
out three years at the routine and often boring work of a commercial
photographer. But he was spending more and more time making his own
pictures, a number of which were contributed to the Sunday Sun
without credit or payment. These were as varied as a tree house along
the Washington boulevard, a harbor scene and a railroad switching yard.
He snapped them between commercial assignments, on weekends and during
vacations. One summer he and Christle went to Oakwood Park Inn on San
Domingo Creek. Aubrey played a little tennis, but spent most of his time
photographing Talbot county's beautiful scenery and out of this came
several exhibition prints. Two other summers he vacationed with another
commercial artist, Wilbur L. Colton, at St. Michaels in a country
boarding house. They traveled from Baltimore by steamboat. One year,
Colton recalls, he thought they had boarded the boat at about the same
time but after it sailed he couldn't find Aubrey on board. Not knowing
what had happened, he waited on the hot pier at Claiborne, the Shore
terminus, until the next boat arrived from Baltimore, hours later.
Aubrey was on that one and sauntered off as if nothing were amiss.
Colton, a much older man than he, asked in understandable rage, “Where
the hell've you been?” Aubrey nonchalantly replied that he had become
absorbed in taking pictures on the Baltimore dock and had missed the
boat. “I knew you'd wait for me,” he said airily. A picture of St.
Michaels made on that vacation won first prize in the Cleveland Photo
Exhibition.
In 1925 Bodine entered three exhibitions
sponsored by the Photographic Society of America and had seven out of
twelve prints accepted. The following year he did the same. In 1927 he
entered seven exhibitions and had fourteen prints accepted. Not bad for
a young man who, for the most part, was learning by trial and error.
His big break came when the Sunday Sun
photographer made an error in judgment. Assigned to take pictures of a
wild turkey preserve, he turned in a number and they were published.
Then it turned out that, unable to get a picture of a wild turkey-a near
impossible feat-in desperation he had bought a young turkey and tied it
in a tree while he photographed it. The trusting editor published the
shot in good faith, but sharp-eyed readers detected a string around the
turkey's leg and a tree branch and called it to the attention of the
editor. The photographer, though he was a good one, was fired for faking
the picture.
When Aubrey heard about this he gathered a
batch of his best pictures and dashed “upstairs.” “Upstairs” was
the editorial office and the word was used with respect, if not awe, by
those who labored in the less glamorous departments of the paper.
He knocked on the door of Mark S. Watson,
recently appointed editor of the Sunday Sun.* He said he wanted
to apply for the position that was open, and he spread his pictures
across the editor's desk. Watson was impressed with the young man and
his work and he moved fast. The photographer who took the turkey picture
was fired May 11, 1927. Aubrey was hired as the Sunday Sun
photographer May 15.
* Before becoming editor of the Sunday Sun, Watson had been
assistant managing editor of the Sun for seven years. He was born
in Plattsburg, N.Y., in 1887, graduated from Union College and worked
for the Chicago Tribune until 1917. When the United States entered World
War I he enlisted in the army and won a commission. A week after the
armistice he was made officer in charge of the soldiers' newspaper, the
Stars and Stripes. He supervised a staff that included Alexander
Woollcott, later a columnist, critic and author, and Harold Ross, who
founded and long edited The New Yorker. After the war Watson became
managing editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. He joined the Sun in
1920. He was editor of the Sunday Sun until World War II, when he
became the Sun's military correspondent. He won the Pulitzer
Prize for his correspondence, and was the first newspaperman to be
awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom (by President Kennedy in 1963),
the highest honor that can be bestowed on a civilian by the
government. He died in 1966. He did much to shape the career of Aubrey
Bodine, who was an ardent admirer and friend all his life.
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