There was a man who took photographs for the WPA when he was young. None of his images became world famous, but he took memorable photographs that preserved a wealth of information about the hard times he saw around him. When war broke out he became an army photographer. His photographs had to be propaganda. Pictures of smiling G.I.s so pleased to receive the cigarettes and letters from home. Pictures of power. Long lines of tanks, guns, bombers. He was among the first into two concentration camps and those pictures would have made him well known if he hadn't been in the army. He didn't want to be famous. He just wanted to record and immortalize the moment - any moment.
When the war was over he was no longer young. He married a German girl and bought a new house on the G.I. bill. He started a photography business.
In 1965 he died from a heart attack. His wife and son took on the sad task of sorting his photographs. The boy was nineteen, a pot smoker and a poet. He and his mother sat at the kitchen table and opened box after box. They laughed. They cried.
When they found the concentration camp pictures they were silenced.
``He never talked about it,'' said the boy, ``Did he talk to you about it?''
``Only once,'' his mother said.
The last box was filled with the WPA photographs. Picture after picture from another world. Battered but dignified cars. Men in hats. Wary eyes. One series of pictures caught the boy's eye. Railroad tracks. Freight trains. Men, women and children living along the tracks. One family in particular taken again and again. A man, a woman, a boy about five, a girl about seven. They seemed to the photographer's son to be as beautiful as humans could be. Who were they? Where were they then and now?
To find them became his obsession. He saw them in his dreams. Lean and strong, leading close and loving lives without much need for material things. He yearned for such simplicity.
It took him more than a year to track them down. The man was dead, the boy had disappeared, the woman lived in Phoenix and the girl was a housewife in Salinas.
He found her in a small house on an unpaved street. A yard full of broken cars and broken toys. A plastic Christmas wreath still on the door in July.
He showed her the photographs of her family from so long ago. She sat on the porch steps in her tee shirt and jeans and looked so long and hard at each picture that the boy wondered if she would ever say anything. She was still a pretty woman - quick with a laugh - decidedly overweight.
Now she handed the photos back.
``Thanks for bringing them,'' she said, ``You want some lunch?''
Iced tea and baloney sandwich.
``You can keep the pictures,'' he said.
She smiled and shook her head. ``Those were hard times. I don't ever want my kids to know what it was like. Things are so good now. It's a new world. I've forgotten all that.'' She waved her hand at the stack of pictures ``But thanks for bringing them.''
The boy drove home thinking of the social implication of body fat - 1930s homeless, 1940s prisoners and the people of Salinas.
He wrote a PhD thesis on an aspect of the subject.