Sherry Chandler

Kentucky Yard Sale Yields a Trove of Weegee Images

As letters go, they aren’t exactly the stuff of literature. One from 1959 asks that the recipient phone Con Edison and complain about an unusually high electric bill ($54.92). Another requests a shipment of beloved New York cigars because of apparent dissatisfaction with the options available in Europe. At least one, written from the Regina-Palast Hotel in Munich, Room 551, starts to provide a hint of the sender.

“Looks like the picture won’t be finished on time,” the letter explains. “It rains every day and we can’t find 2 midgets, so it looks like I’ll be here at least 2 more weeks.”

The letters, along with 210 vintage black-and-white photographic prints, were found in 2003 in a zebra-stripe trunk that was bought at a yard sale in Kentucky by two Indiana women who were on their way back from a camping trip. One of the women simply liked the look of the trunk, and when she found old clothes, yellowed papers and pictures inside, she thought about throwing the contents away.

But she took them instead to an Indianapolis rare-documents dealer. And this week the Indianapolis Museum of Art plans to announce that it has acquired a trove of work and correspondence by Weegee, the crepuscular, stogie-smoking New York photographer whose visceral pictures became a template not only for artists like Diane Arbus but also for much of the uncomfortably close tabloid imagery that exists today.

So this weekend (June 5, 6, 7, & 8), Kentucky is gearing up for the 400 Mile Yard Sale along U.S. 68 from Maysville to Paducah. Come on out. Ya never know what you might find.

The incomparable Lance Mannion tells us a fable, or possibly a foundation myth:

Reading Rick Perlstein’s magnificent Nixonland and in my head watching Richard Nixon nursing his grievances and resentments as he outwits and outmaneuvers one rival after and another, defeats and destroys various political opponents, survives setbacks personal and professional that would have convinced other men that it was not meant to be, I can’t help admiring the man even as I cringe and wince as he crawls and connives and plots and finagles and cheats and lies his way towards the White House, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Watergate.

But it’s really not Nixon himself I’m admiring. It’s his story. The bare bones outline of it. I admire that story because it is a great American story. It’s in fact the American myth.

Nixon’s story has been acted out again and again throughout our history, but usually with this one slight difference.

The hero of the story is a hero.

At least as we like to tell it.

Nixon’s story is the story of the talented and ambitious kid born in obscurity, raised without privilege, lonely and out of place in his family and among his friends and neighbors, working hard, surmounting obstacles, and with each obstacle overcome finding a new one springing up in his path, earning his way, succeeding at long last despite everything.

We know this story because we’ve been told it over and over with the intention of the people telling it to us being that we admire the heroes and heroines of the various versions of the story and model our own story after theirs.

Nixon’s story is exactly the same as Abraham Lincoln’s story.

It’s the same as Barack Obama’s story. And Bill Clinton’s story.

It’s Thomas Edison’s story, and Andrew Carnegie’s, and Mark Twain’s, and Helen Keller’s.

So where did Nixon go wrong? Or did he go wrong? Go read and learn.

Meanwhile, Tom Watson is more direct. If I read him right, he thinks we may still be living in Nixonland:

Recalling Nixon through the rear-view mirror with Watergate stamped into the chrome, we tend to remember the defeated Final Days President, the broken man and his comeback on David Frost. But the Nixon I saw for that brief moment - and the Nixon portrayed in Rick Perlstein’s terrific Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, was a vibrant politician at the pinnacle who connected with the masses, carving an electorally successful path between the feuding liberal Democrats and their crippling war and the growing right wing class anger of Goldwater and Reagan. That’s the Nixon you see on the cover of Nixonland.

I’m about five chapters into Perlstein’s satisfying reader, and he brings back all that feeling of Nixon’s utter dominance of the political landscape from LBJ’s sad sunset to his own long and dramatic tragedy. And along the way, the characters are dreamily compelling to this child (literally) of the 60s - and amazingly current as well. You’ll find traces of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and John McCain in Nixonland, and you’ll discover bits of this presidential race as well. The set pieces remain so very much the same on the stage of our cultural landscape - it’s almost scary how little we’ve changed.