By Ben Gelman, who has worked for The Southern Illinoisan © newspaper in Carbondale, IL since 1956, first as a photographer and then as a reporter. This commentary appeared in The Southern Illinoisan in September 1998.

Making photos for a newspaper, even a regional publication such as The Southern Illinoisan ©, means occasionally meeting people known nationally and even worldwide.

Southern Illinoisans love country and western music and regularly bring country stars to the area for concerts. Tex Ritter (known to younger readers as the father of TV comedian John Ritter) was one of the first country singers I photographed, when he appeared at a show in Marion, Illinois.

For several years, I was assigned to cover the Du Quoin State Fair, where I photographed and sometimes interviewed country singers such as Dolly Parton and Eddie Arnold. Many entertainers, including Louis Armstrong, Net King Cole, Johnny Carson, and Red Skelton, showed up in my camera viewfinder.

Politicians were high on my list of favorite portraits. I took many pictures of Paul Powell, Speaker of the Illinois House, and was the first photographer he allowed on the floor to take pictures while the House was in session.

No doubt the most famous political figure I ever photographed was Senator John F. Kennedy, D-Mass., when he made a lightning campaign tour through Southern Illinois on his way to the U.S. presidency. It was October 3, 1960. Kennedy, accompanied by Senator Paul Douglas, D-Illinois; Otto Kerner, Democratic candidate for Illinois governor; Illinois Rep. Kenneth J. Gray, D-West Frankfort, and other regional politicians; started the area tour with an appearance at McAndrew Stadium of Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Kennedy then visited the Veterans Administration Hospital and the town square in Marion, the town square in Harrisburg and finally the Williamson County airport. At each stop I got pictures that were published in The Southern Illinoisan.

Four years later, U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater, R-Arizona, was running for the presidency against President Lyndon B. Johnson. When Goldwater made a tour through Southern Illinois on October 3, 1964, I was assigned to get photos of the Republican candidate as he made his way from Cairo to Carbondale on a special Illinois Central Railroad train.

I have a lot of wonderful memories of my years at The Southern Illinoisan. For many years I made my living with a camera. The first few years I worked for The Southern Illinoisan, I did more photography than reporting. The first writing I did for the newspaper was doing the captions for the pictures I made.

This fall (1998) will be 42 years since I started work for the paper and I’ve been trying to think back to those early days and pick out memorable moments. One such moment came the day after a tornado ripped through Murphysboro and other area communities on December 15, 1957.

The sun was just coming up on the destruction wrought by the storm when I noticed a man going through the remains of his possessions amid the wreckage of his home. He picked up a book that turned out to be what was left of his family album. I snapped a picture of him holding the album just as the first rays of the sun illuminated his grief-stricken face.

He had lost his wife and three children in the storm and the book held the only pictures of them that remained. My photo made the first page of that day’s Southern Illinoisan and later won first prize for newspapers of all sizes in the Illinois Associated Press annual photo contest.

Veteran journalists become inured to feelings of guilt incurred by writing about or photographing disaster victims, but I was still new at the game and I felt bad about having capitalized on that man’s troubles.

A year later, however, the man called me with a tale that made me feel a little better. An area woman had seen the photo and had written him a note of sympathy. It seems she had recently lost her husband and had three children. They met, talked, and eventually fell in love and now they were about to get married.

The couple could never regain their original wife, husband, and lost children, but now they had a new family on whom to build a future. It was a storybook ending to a grim news item.

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More information on Southern Illinois is available in the book by C. William Horrell, Henry Dan Piper, and John W. Voight, “Land between the Rivers: The Southern Illinois Country” Southern Illinois University Press, 1973.

Also a comprehensive history of Illinois is presented in the book by Lois Carrier, “Illinois: Crossroads of a Continent” University of Illinois Press, 1993.

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