Call it the joy of unintended consequences. My father gave a Canon flatbed scanner to my mother for Christmas. By early February, the two of them finally cleared enough room on their upstairs office desk for the flatbed, pulled the device out of the box and hooked it up. This week my father began testing the scanner's ability to read slide positives and, drawing from a box of pictures snapped four decades ago, found himself a project.
For the last two days he's sent me a pair of images attached to an e-mail whose subject line has done nothing to help me recognize what I've found on my computer screen.
The first pair was of "Moondog." Moondog? I asked my old man today: Moondog, he told me, was a Manhattan panhandling poet-eccentric of some sort. Searching the net tonight, I found a goodly amount of information on the man, including a 1970 Upstate magazine article that matched my father's description, if a bit more gracefully. I also learned that Moondog was a musician of a suitably unique oeuvre.
Here's Moondog standing, according to my father, "at the corner of Avenue of the Americas and 54th Street, just nearby Black Rock."
Dad took these photographs right before he left for college in 1966.