Some years ago, Kathy and I were in Tucson visiting my late grandma. My mom was there too, from Minnesota and she was going through her parents' old photos when she came across this picture. Not a photo of an old family member but one of my great-GREAT grandfather's classmates from Cornell University. Like when I was in high school, evidently at Cornell in 1881 students swapped senior pictures for posterity's sake.
That's right. 1881.
Which is what makes this photographic remembrance -- and Frank Ramsey Luckey who conceived and "starred" in it -- all the more remarkable. The Lumiere brothers and Thomas Edison didn't introduce the world to motion pictures for another fourteen years, yet this guy, in a jokey keepsake for his buddies, created this -- twenty three different pictures of himself (the "serious" acceptable, portrait hovering in the center)via a visual, flip-book kind of sequence. But unlike a flip-book which conveys a single action, here Luckey shows all moods and expressions and even cross dresses (which seems to never go out of style).
Certain that Luckey was a drama student with ambitions exceeding the mere theatrical stage, I did a web search to see what noteworthy and creative heights he achieved... only to learn that he went on to become a Congregational minister in New England. I was disappointed at first -- I had expected more -- but Kathy reminded me that a clergyman (particularly of the non-dogmatic, open-minded Congregational stripe) is at once a writer, an actor and a source of inspiration.
Still if the guy had only hooked up with an inventor and a late-nineteenth century venture capitalist, who knows... maybe FDR and Churchill would've been Tweeting each other...
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