Awonder Liang, Chess Champion, Madison

It’s been awhile since I’ve written here, I was kinda wondering if they might have closed my blog down due to absenteeism.  Been busy, me, as my Cajun cousins say, catching up after I had some time off, got bit by that nasty hanger-on of a flu bug ( twice ) , and making up for lost time ever since.  Shooting for the March/April 2012 issue of Wisconsin Trails I met some new friends, both human and otherwise.  Coolest person I’ve met in a while was  Awonder Liang of Madison, the World Chess Champion in the under eight division.  Awonder is now 8, and when I photographed him in Madison I was struck by how sweet he was, especially when he played against a classmate.  In a very gentle way he both taught and beat the other kid, explaining various moves and their outcomes.  In my head I kept hearing the father’s  line from the movie  Searching for Bobby Fischer : “He’s better at this than I’ve ever been at anything in my life. He’s better at this than you’ll ever be, at anything. “  Note preponderance of captured black pawns in the photo above.

On January 12th, as luck would have it, I ended up driving to Madison in our first nasty snowstorm of the year.  There is a set of rules not laid out by me, but I have to abide by them nonetheless.  This particular rule is about weather.  If I’m heading out for an overnight trip in spring, summer, or fall the weather on the drive up is picture-postcard perfect.  When I step out of my hotel or crawl out of my tent it is pouring rain and/or so windy that loons taking off from lakes end up behind themselves.  In winter it’s somewhat reversed.  My drive to and from a location is preceded by a blue sky day, but on my travel day it is howling wind with snow falling and cars spun out in the center ditch of the highway.  I was headed to the Ivory Room Piano Bar to photograph some of the Madison music scene as part of the story going into the magazine’s current issue.  I spent a little time with Johnny Chimes, a soulful, bluesy piano player who hangs his hat at the Ivory Room in Madison and at Louisianne’s in Middleton.  Something is so magic about a heavy snow and the nightlife, seeing everything turn white from inside a warm room, music making it glitter all the more.  I was lulled into comfort by this setting and then remembered that I had to drive home in the storm.   Two blocks from the capitol I came  within an inch of sliding into a parked Madison police officer, whose eyes I could see in his rear-view, and then me reading his thoughts: ” Mister, if you hit my squad the Iliad and the Odyssey will look like short stories compared to the tickets I will write you.”  But an inch is inch and a miss is a miss, and three and a half hours later I got home to Burlington, white-knuckled but safe.

Johnny Chimes plays the Ivory Room in Madison

PIGGIES! Blue Mounds

And what is a month for me without animals?  Can’t have that,  so I went to Blue Mounds to shoot Chef Dan Fox of the Madison Club and some of the heirloom pigs he and some friends raise.  If anything sounds funnier than a pig happy about getting some food I don’t know what it is.  You can read more about all these people and porcines in the March/April 2012 issue of Wisconsin Trails.

Lucky Kitty and his Christmas Tree

Most Decembers I get caught up in it all, full of raucous joy, willing and able to get all jacked up on Christmas.  This year for a lot of reasons I’m way behind the curve, and here it is the night before Christmas Eve.  Still, though Christmas hasn’t been coming out of me, it does seem like it has tried to get into me.  Some things were on the small side of wonder  like my cat Lucky and the Christmas tree.  I swear he adores the tree.  Late at night he walks around it, smelling the branches and looking at the lights and ornaments.  He never plays with the ornaments,  just walks around the tree, looks, changes his viewing angle and then looks some more.  Whereas most of the family just accepts the tree after the first couple of nights, Lucky is smitten. Such a simple thing, yet it warms my heart.

I’m usually one to be grateful, understanding how blessed I am, how blessed my family is.  I’m ashamed to say that I’ve been less than that this month.  Until a chance walk to the elevators at our office knocked me back to my senses.  Some of the good people I work with set up a Christmas tree that was decorated that morning with dozens of cards containing the Christmas wishes of  underprivileged children. If people wanted to they could take one of these cards and fulfill a child’s wish.  I walked by at 9 a.m. on the way out to a shoot and the tree was full.  When I came back at 11 a.m. there were just a few left.  Made me really proud of my fellow employees at Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.  As I walked by a man and a woman  were taking these last cards.  They were talking as I walked by and I overheard the woman, a really nice person whom I’ll call Winter, say ” This is SO important.  When I was a kid I stood in line at the Toys for Tots giveaways and we all got to pick one toy for Christmas. We were so thankful.”  I got the feeling that I was with the ghost of Christmas Past and the Ghost of Christmas Present at the same time.  Funny thing is, she had her back to me as I walked by her and I don’t think she knew that I was even there, yet her story affected me deeply.  Thank you Winter, for waking me the hell up and knocking my heart back into the right place.

Then there’s Tommy.  My wife is a friend of Tommy’s mom so I hear a lot of stories about him.  Very simple things are difficult for Tommy, things that you and I take for granted.  He has a mental struggle with daily life that few of us can comprehend.  A couple of days ago I heard something about Tommy I didn’t know:  Tommy is twenty-one years old.  He still believes in the guy with the reindeer.  I have a picture in my mind of Tommy fighting sleep on Christmas Eve as he waits for Santa.  That is so profoundly beautiful to me.

So Lucky, Winter, Tommy, thank you.  For wonder, and gratitude, and beauty.  Merry Christmas

Move ahead a few more decades than I’d like to admit and I’m at Lambeau Field photographing Packers fans while they are tailgating.  Green and Gold everywhere, smiles, and a  whole lot of ” ‘hoopin’ ‘n hollerin’ ” as my grandfather would say.  Their excitement gets me thinking about my mother as a fan way back then, and I’m seeing that same fervor in all the fans here.  I’m wondering if they can remember when they first became fans like I can.  Although the weather is quite different, Wisconsin still has always reminded me of Alabama: pines and hills, waters full of fish, kindhearted people, and football fans.  I can tell you that the two states are tied in a dead heat in terms of how many people you see wearing their teams colors on any given day.  And like my mama would tell you, before they wore Green and Gold, a few of the Packer boys wore Crimson and White.  Their names are Paul Ott Caruth, Larry Lauer, Russ Mosley, Rebel Steiner, George Teague, and current Packers strong safety Charlie Peprah.  Oh, yeah, and a couple of other guys who did okay in Green and Gold: Don Hutson and Bart Starr.

In  brightness of youth they traveled to far-off lands, fought for those whose freedom was taken, fought for a freedom theirs, and fought to make sure there was a freedom for those yet to be.  Take a little minute and imagine dropping your whole life right now to go off across an ocean and fight and maybe not come back.  That was the reality for the World War II veterans from Wisconsin that I photographed returning home from the Stars & Stripes Honor Flight on October 8th to Mitchell Airport in Milwaukee. The Honor Flights take veterans to see their war memorial in Washington D.C., something that a lot of them could otherwise not do because of physical or financial reasons.  The Honor Flights are concentrating on the World War II veterans right now as we are losing about 1,000 of them every day.  As time moves on, the flights will take up the veterans of Korea and Vietnam.

To see this event unfold was one of my most rewarding moments as a photographer, and one of my most humbling as an American.  Thousands of people were there beforehand to take a place and make a sign to welcome back their friend or family member.  Many held aged pictures made when these men were in their youth, posing for a photograph in their uniform.  To be there was to see and hear stories, to behold love, and to feel joy.  I got to laugh with Virginia Driesen as she told me about her husband Brad’s first USAF landing that took place in a field rather than on the intended runway.

Virginia and Brad Driesen

I got to meet the Zadra family and take Max Zadra’s picture as he stood waiting in his Grandfather Joe’s uniform.  Master Sgt. Joe Zadra fought at the Battle of the Bulge and during the war he had intelligence maps sewn in the lining of the coat that  his thirteen year-old grandson Max is wearing below.

Max Zadra in Grandpa Joe's uniform

When the Honor Flights came in and the veterans walked and rolled down the aisle, applause shook the terminal and the emotion of it shook me. To see the happiness on the faces of the vets as they saw the giant crowd, to watch little kids reaching out to shake their hands, to see some of them trying to hold back tears, to feel the warmth of a vets hand as he thanked me for taking his picture…well, I’d like to tell you that I’m a professional observer, that like my journalistic colleagues I can be cool and detached from the emotion of events I’m covering but that would be pulling both your legs and at least one of your arms.  I was emotional the whole time,  smiling and crying  big old happy tears, feeling so lucky to have been witness to it all.

Each veteran on the Honor Flight has a Guardian.  He or she is with their assigned veteran at all times, making sure they have whatever they need, whenever they need it.  The veterans wear blue jackets with the Honor Flight logo, the Guardians, red jackets.  On the Honor Flights the veterans entire trip is paid for.  The Guardian volunteers not only their time, but pays for their own flight.  A couple of weeks back I photographed Guardian Kathy Nevins and Melvin Schmidt, her veteran, at Melvin’s home.  We’re telling Kathy and Melvin’s Honor Flight stories in detail in Wisconsin Trails, so we wanted to get a portrait of them in a more controlled environment.  During the shoot Kathy kept using the word ” privilege ” in reference to her Honor Flight service.   As I left the parking lot at Mitchell Saturday night, I looked  in the rear view mirror and said one word to myself out loud:  privileged.  Thank you veterans, for making it so.

If you’d like to  see a schedule of Stars & Stripes Honor Flights in Wisconsin or to volunteer, go to http://starsandstripeshonorflight.org/  For other states, have a look at the Honor Flight national homepage: http://www.honorflight.org/

Have a look at a slideshow of the October 8th Stars & Stripes Honor Flight below and you can also look forward to learning more about the Honor Flight in the November/December issue of Wisconsin Trails coming out soon.

Came quick, didn’t it?  Stands to reason that it will go quick, too.  Fall is my favorite season for a lot of reasons.  The obvious beauty of it, deep slumbers, football ( Roll Tide ), diminished bugs, and not least of all the putting on of longer, heavier clothes that mask my lack of restraint at summer barbeques.  As much as I love fall, photographically it is a tense time for me, as I worry a lot about ” the color “  in a way near to girls worrying about ” the wedding.” Where it’s going to be, is it going to be there when I get there, am I too early or too late?  My fall worry came early this year since our summer cooled off early and it seems that ” the color ” is coming faster than usual.  I’m trying to take a deep breath and think about the pleasure of it, the joy of making pictures in Wisconsin, the serenity of a woodland path and maybe even some late season camping with my wife and grandsons.  So even though today is just the first day of fall, get your calendar out and mark off some time for yourself in this prettiest, yet briefest of seasons.

Or the first sumacs already turned red.

Not the otherworldy glow of Friday night football,

Not the green corn browning as it readies for harvest.

It was August 25th, in Muskego,

The night I knew summer ended.

A carnival.

Popcorn-smelling, bright lights shining, two parts thrill

Stirred with one part sadness.

Kids near bursting a week before school,

Last of their summer freedom slipping away.

An old carnie sits at his stand, another season behind him.

United States Coast Guard RB-M 45604, USCG Station Milwaukee

It’s a blue sky day with calm winds and no chop as we head outside the breakwater and into Lake Michigan aboard United States Coast Guard Response Boat Medium 45604 out of USCG Station Milwaukee.  Though today’s weather is beautiful, I look at the young crew and think about them heading out on a Search and Rescue mission when one of our Great Lakes  turns wind-swept and forbidding.  At those times, when they head out when others are heading in, we’re served well by their motto ” Semper Paratus ” Latin for ” Always Ready.” It’s a really appropriate motto given that the Coast Guard is the smallest military branch yet its men and women have a gigantic to-do list:  search and rescue, maritime law enforcement, environmental protection, drug enforcement, maintaining aids to navigation, educating the public about boating, ice breaking, and Homeland Security.  Here in Wisconsin, Lakes Michigan and Superior and our other inland waterways are looked after by USCG Sector Lake Michigan and Sector Sault Sainte Marie.  From 2008 through 2010 alone, the two sectors had a combined total of 516 lives saved.  Think about that number turned the other way.  Imagine 516 empty places at 516 Thanksgiving dinners.  It doesn’t get much more important than that.

Special thanks to USCG Sector Lake Michigan Station Milwaukee, the crews of RB-M 45604 and RB-S 25830, Boatswain’s Mate Chief Petty Officer Matthew Draper, Boatswain’s Mate Second Class Operations Petty Officer Sam Burnside, Lieutenant Casey Steuer, and Lieutenant Junior Grade Brian Dykens.  From USCG Sector Sault Sainte Marie thanks to Lieutenant Kenneth ( Rob ) Scott and Lieutenant Junior Grade Adam Saurin.

The United States Coast Guard’s Sectors Lake Michigan and Sault Sainte Marie are part of the Wisconsin Trails magazine September/October 2011 Portfolio section called ” The Guardians ” a shout out to those who help others in the state of Wisconsin.

Near midnight I stand alone in the parking lot of Gordon Park in Milwaukee.  Some time passes and then a car pulls up next to me.  From a darkened window a voice asks, “ Are you waiting for a certain group of people?”  Eyes cast downward, I answer that yes, I am.  There is anonymity at work here, and I mean to respect it.  I point to a spot in the distance and tell them to meet me there when they are ready.  I’m photographing them as part of the Portfolio section of the Wisconsin Trails September/October issue.  In a few minutes five men approach in the darkness.    Their names are the Watchman, Blackbird, Charade, the Crimson Crusader, and Electron. They are all in costume.  They are all Real Life Super Heroes.  Collectively the group is known as the Challengers.    They stand against what might be man’s most virulent kryptonite: apathy.  While most of us are falling asleep to the blue flicker of a television, the Challengers patrol the neighborhoods of Milwaukee and Madison, serving as an extra set of eyes and ears for the police while their presence acts as a deterrent to crime. They also bring food and other supplies to homeless people throughout the city and help out some local charities.  Before you scoff at the idea of men dressed up as super heroes, ask yourself this question: What have I done to better my street, my community, or for people less fortunate than me? “  I know that when I asked that question of myself, my answer fell far short of where I would have liked it to be.

Here are some answers to questions I asked of the Challengers.

What inspired you to do this?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               “There are two things I have always loved, superheroes and helping people, I think doing this was natural evolution of self for me. At some point I just decided the world really needs superheroes, and although I may never actually be a superhero, I figured I could at least try. “  -The Watchman

I have friends on every side of politics and work in a kind of place where people bitch about politics and race issues and all the things that people think they can’t control and make them upset.  I see this as an active approach to making your world better or doing your part.  It’s one thing to get mad about someone breaking into a car on your block, it’s another to go out and look out for this. Who does that? ” -Blackbird

Blackbird

The Watchman

Electron

” A while back, one of my best friends got robbed through his car and shot in the face. He lived, but suffered extensive damage including the loss of one eye. I’ve always pondered the idea of making non-lethal weaponry and defensive technology, but it wasn’t until then that I realized I had to do something more than just draw and wish I could make a difference. It was then that I discovered Electron, the hero I’ve always wanted to be. However, since then there have been a number of reasons to continue my work and I’m sure a number of reasons yet to be discovered. “  -Electron

” I had ideas of donning a mask and patroling the streets for around seven years now, but it didn’t seem like a realistic idea until I heard about the Real Life Superheroes. Even before the mask, I was often told that I have a “hero complex.” I’ve always admired guys like Robin Hood, Zorro, and Batman; the guys without any superpowers that still try to make the world around them a better place. And that’s exactly what I’m hoping to do.” – The Crimson Crusader

What do you typically do on patrol?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              ” Patrols have changed, we used to ‘nest’ a lot and watch for things going on by just staying still and paying attention to high traffic areas.  We do a lot on mobile patrols now and mix it up.  Checking the homeless areas that we’re aware of is a high priority too, the cops don’t know about them and they’re working hard to survive so we help them with food and supplies that we imagine they need when we observe their site. “  -Blackbird

Charade

” I typically just walk around and keep an eye out for trouble. I talk to people when approached. I focus on teens since I am only recently turned 18, I can understand them better than most of the other heroes. “ -Charade

” We first look and listen to get a feel for the general atmosphere of the location we’re patrolling that night. We are looking to see how much traffic there is, both foot and vehicle, and listen to determine the general mood people seem to be in. That gives us a good idea of what we can expect the night to be like.  As we patrol, we look for signs of any problems, such as evidence of break-ins or vandalism, and we listen for sounds that could be arguing, screeching tires, banging, breaking glass, or calls for help.  As we walk, we also talk to people and explain to them what we are doing in hopes it it may inspire others to do more to help others. “ -The Watchman

Best memory of being a Real Life Superhero?

 ”I have a gigantic portrait hanging in a French airport right now, Watchman has a huge one hanging in France at a movie theater.  That’s pretty cool, we’re just a couple of guys in Wisconsin, but our alter-egos are nationally known. ” -Blackbird

“  Every time I suit up. It’s a great feeling to get together with like-minded people and trying to make things better in the world.” – The Crimson Crusader

The Crimson Crusader

Advice for others who might want to go down the same road?

” I think people need to do it for the right reason, there’s a fine line between an rlsh ( Real Life Super Hero ) wanting to do right and a sociopath that want’s to make up for their personal shortcomings with aggressive behavior towards people. “ -Blackbird