Gene

This is not the way I wanted this to be done.

I’ve talked here before about my years at a place called Shaw Camera Shop—4468 Shaw Ave, in St. Louis, Missouri.  I worked there for 20 years.  I did black & white processing, printing, waited counter, swept up, stocked shelves, eventually hired (and fired) people and ran the lab, finally, toward the end, ran practically all of it because the then owner more or less walked away from it and let it die.  I ended my tenure there with mixed feelings.

But the first 11 years were the years in which I grew up.

The two people who owned it then and ran it were straight out of a Dickens novel in many ways.  Open-hearted, fun-loving, generous to a fault.  They tended to adopt people and I was one of the ones who got swept in.

We found Shaw Camera back when I was 15 and had discovered photography.  They were the supply house, the advisers, the place to go to hang out and imbibe the visual air.

Gene and Earline Knackstedt were a second set of parents to me.  I loved them both dearly.  Earline trained me to be a printer.  She was good, she was so good, at what she did.  What was amazing about her was the boundless energy she possessed, in spite of the fact that she had been fighting cancer in one form or another since the Sixties.  While working for them, she had a reoccurrence—three of them—and finally, in 1985, died.

Gene and Earline were, if nothing else, best friends as well as husband and wife.  Quite unconsciously, I took them as the model for my own relationship.  Donna and I are best friends.  That has seen us through a lot of troubled times.  The same for Gene and Earl (as everyone called her).

Gene took care of the retail end for the most part.  He was one of those ideal shopkeepers—amiable, wide range of knowledge, good story-teller, the kind of man everyone seems to like.  Neat, meticulous, in many ways still a kid.  He learned to fly while I worked for them.  He loved it.

Both of them loved.  Everything.  Good food, travel, good books—but mainly they loved their friends and made them all feel as welcome as possible.  They had a house far from St. Louis in a lakeside development with a lot of open, undeveloped land around.  I often spent weekends down there.  Earl and I would go for long hikes, me lugging 20 or 30 pounds of cameras along.  Gene came down Saturday afternoons after closing up the shop.

When Earl passed away, Gene sold the shop.  He wanted me to buy it.  That was hard.  I’d decided by then that I really wanted to be a writer and I knew that if I took on the shop that would be all but impossible.  Running a business is a hundred-hour-a-week proposition, and I knew that.  I’d watched, I’d learned.  So to his disappointment (I’m sure) I said no.  I didn’t want Gene to do that, but I understood.  Too many ghosts in those rooms.  Earl was gone, the memories would be sandpaper and razor blades.

So he did sell it.  And he sold it to someone who didn’t seem to understand what it took. In any event, Shaw Camera stumbled on for another 9 years before finally succumbing to the loss of its resident spirits—Gene and Earl.

Gene retired to his place in the country.  Donna and I still went down occasionally, but it was clear that things weren’t quite the same anymore.  And I got more deeply involved in my own dream, which took far more time than I’d ever imagined.  But I kept in touch as best I could.  For a time, Gene served as a deputy sheriff.  He practically ran the local airport.

And then I lost track completely.  When my first novel, Mirage, came out I sent him a copy and got back and enthusiastic post card.  I called.  Something wasn’t right, he didn’t speak well.  It turned out that he’d suffered his own bout of cancer—they had taken out a part of his tongue and jaw.  During the operation, he’d had a stroke on the table.

We visited.  His companion absented herself during our stay.  We knew her so this kind of surprised us, but it became apparent that, on her part, we weren’t welcome.  We spent a last weekend with Gene, who was still sharp, though impaired, and we talked a great deal about the past and what had been and what might have been.  We “took care of business”, as it were.

I thought we see him again.  But that was 2000 and the next years were hard and difficult and disappointing and.  Still, I thought we’d see him again.  I meant to call, to write.  Admittedly, we were both put off by the attitude of his companion, who took very good care of him, and were reluctant to add any discomfort.  Still, I’d intended…

I suppose what hurts is no one ever told us.  I had to dig it up on the web.  Gene evidently passed away a few years ago, at 76.  There had been no memorial service for Earline, per her request, and Gene felt pretty much the same, so that doesn’t surprise me, but no one, among all our mutual acquaintances, let us know.  I’m not sure what to make of that.

Gene was one of my best friends.  He taught me a lot.  He was something.  I shot this at one of the last visits we made before he’d become ill.

Farewell.