| Bill
Cherry's Galveston Memories |
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The
Famous Portrait of
the Little Girl Named Judy by
Bill Cherry | |
It
hasn’t been that long ago, really, since a major portion of physicians, dentists
and attorneys had their offices in their city’s downtown. The prestigious ones
were in big bank and major office buildings; the lessers sprinkled in here and
there.
And ladies wore their nicest dresses with big hats and gloved hands
whenever they went downtown, even if they got there by a city bus rather than
in the backseat of a chauffer driven Cadillac limousine.
In fact the only
way you knew they weren’t on their way to church was because it wasn’t Sunday
and they didn’t have a Bible under their arm.
During the war years, Edolia
(Ed) Rees and her daughter, Joyce Crainer, drove into downtown Houston for Miss
Joyce’s appointment with the doctor. His office was there on Main Street above
a very famous portrait photographer’s studio. |
Portrait
of Judy
Courtesy Witwer Studio & Judy Damiani |
Miss Joyce and
Miss Ed were taken when they saw the portrait in the studio’s window of a pretty
young girl. She was sitting on a stool, looking at herself in a hand mirror. Miss
Joyce said to her mom, “If someday I have a girl, I want to have her photographed
just like that.”
Wouldn’t you know it wasn’t long until Miss Joyce had
her first baby and it was a girl? She and her husband, Cecil, named her Judith;
Judy for short.
When Judy reached four, for Christmas her grandmother gave
Judy’s mother a gift certificate so that Galveston photographer, Tommy Witwer,
could pose Judy just like the little girl had been in the portrait that they had
seen in the Houston photographer’s show window.
When Mr. Tommy had the
pose ready to shoot, he put his head under the black cloth hood of the big wooden
camera. That’s when he noticed something that he hadn’t posed. The camera was
also seeing the reflection of Judy looking at herself in the mirror. That nuance
had been missing in the other photographer’s work.
”Perfect artistry sent
by God,” Mr. Tommy said to himself, and then he pushed the plunger that flicked
the shutter. God and Mr. Tommy’s picture of Judy won national awards.
Sixty
years later, a copy of that portrait of Judy Crainer Damiani is among my collection
of favorite Galveston memories.
Bill
Cherry's Galveston Memories
September 17, 2010 column
Copyright 2010 – William S. Cherry |
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