Birthdays are a funny thing. When you’re young, they are all about getting older. You can hardly wait for the next one.
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Then, somewhere along the way, they’re not. Suddenly, big league baseball players, your doctors, and bosses are all younger than you.
Eventually, getting older becomes key again. You want to see more birthdays.
This week I celebrated a birthday of my own, and also photographed a World War II veteran celebrating his 100th. I also photographed church services for an upcoming story on a South Jersey town a century after it was incorporated as the first Black self-governing municipality north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
And I photographed a president, who unlike most of my coworkers and the folks I usually photograph, grew up before the internet and listened to music as it transitioned from Tony Bennett and Perry Como to Bill Haley & His Comets and Elvis.
One of the ways I marked by birthday was by visiting the Main Line Camera Club as their guest speaker. Meeting people who appreciate photography is one of the things that keeps me young. That along with the joy I get from making and sharing photos.
They had many good images but one that stood out for a “different” photo that Jeffrey Benne took during the recent visit by Union Pacific’s famed Big Boy No. 4014, the world’s largest operating steam locomotive. My colleague Monica Herndon also photographed the big engine that could, but until I saw she was headed to Reading, I had no knowledge of it.
After Googling, my social feed exploded with videos and photos of the train along its historic coast-to-coast tour to celebrate America’s 250th. I even heard traffic reports on KYW radio as it approached Philadelphia that weekend begging drivers to quit being foolish by stopping on the Schuylkill Expressway and getting out of their cars to photograph it passing by, being a bunch of train “foamers” (a term I just learned this week).
Benne arrived in Bridgeport, Pa. 45 minutes before Big Boy’s arrival, staking his claim “on a piece of ground then played with the settings on my gear to get a good shot,” with just about 45 seconds to get it passing by.
Afterward, he said he noticed the crowd searching the tracks and realized they were looking for smooshed coins, having set regular coins on the track minutes before. “I should have done that myself,” he said.
Growing up, my friends and I did that, and usually had little luck finding our own “smooshed” pennies.
Pat Dailey, setting up the birthday party in the photo at the top, founded the Tun Legacy Foundation, a nonprofit that supports veteran causes, Masonic charities, and educational scholarships. They are also rebuilding and reestablishing an authentic reproduction of the original Tun Tavern building in Philadelphia. The Tun, constructed in 1693, was the first documented lodge in North America and the birthplace of the U.S. Marine Corps in (1775).
Photographing workers setting up for the Red Carpet on Independence Hall was my only contribution to our coverage of Philly’s hosting the MLB All-Star Game for the first time in 30 years (I did cover THAT game).
You can see the awesome photos made by my colleagues Yong Kim, Monica Herndon, David Maialetti and Elizabeth Robertson who did cover this week’s All-Star events.
I made the Independence Mall prep photo during an early morning check-in on the President’s House site, something I have been doing for months.
There was nothing new on the site that morning, since I had found National Park Service employees a week earlier taking photos and measurements, and looking under, behind, and above the panels. They told me they were “just looking around” and not there to install the new Trump administration panels after a federal appeals court gave the go-ahead just before the Fourth of July weekend.
Two days later, I was covering President Donald Trump at the War College in Carlisle, when his administration shut down the television screens and swapped out panels on the brutality of slavery at the site for displays that experts say sanitize George Washington’s role as an enslaver.
But unlike the original January removal and the subsequent court-ordered return months later, they did it in the middle of the night, avoiding public scrutiny.
Our reporters and photographer Jessica Griffin were there in the morning to document it all.
The alterations are a culmination of about a year of turmoil since the president’s executive order to review or remove displays at national parks that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”
Since 1998 a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in the print editions of The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color:
» SEE MORE: Archived columns and Twenty years of a photo column.