Written by Andrew McLemore|
Last updated
A hunting photo of my dad goes viral. I interviewed him to find out why.
You see that little kid there? That’s my dad — and he’s still showing me up 75 years later. I recently wrote a 2,000-word story about my complicated connection to hunting, and I included this image to reveal a small slice of my Texas family history.
Despite my tantalizing prose, the photo attracted the most attention from everyone who talked to me. That’s not surprising, I suppose, given that the image also received lots of love on the “Traces of Texas” Facebook page, where it got thousands of likes and more than 400 comments.
1950: The author's father (age 7) learns to shoot a rifle after church on a Sunday
So what’s going on here? Truth be told, it’s a bit of a mystery even to me — and I like to think I’m an expert on both journalism and my father.
But I’d never seen this photograph until my dad showed it to me recently. And that part is surprising. As a lifelong photographer and academic, my dad has spent much of his life obsessing over photos and constantly chasing new travel destinations for inspiration. Often, that meant documentary-style subjects like village life in India or fishermen in Southeast Asia. But in truth, it’s our own family that has received the bulk of his attention, resulting in dozens (hundreds?) of scrapbooks over the years, and countless emails using a specific image to recount family history.
Safe to say: My dad is rarely in these images, as he was nearly always the photographer. Even less so his own father, who died before I was born. I’ve long wished that I had known him. The more I hear about him from my dad, the more I realize that he unknowingly defined my life’s trajectory by being a rare kind of man for East Texas. He passed on to my father (and then myself) many of the best qualities of Texas natives, and few of the unsavory ones.
So I sat down with my dad, who I’ve always called “Pop,” to fill in some gaps in my knowledge and try to understand why a forgotten piece of my family’s history has resonated with so many people.
The author as a young boy. "The first and only time I went hunting with my dad, in this case for doves in South Texas."
Andrew: Was Grandpa Mac a hunter? How much do you know about his background in hunting?
Pop: He was not a hunter, except what he had done to get fresh meat for his family when he was a boy. But most young men of his generation and background, of necessity, knew the essentials of rifles and shotguns. He really spent more time showing me how to catch a fish!
Why did he take you out that day? Do you remember?
When I was 6 years old in the first grade, he decided I should learn to use a rifle and gifted me a Remington single shot .22 for Christmas in 1950. During that historical period, this was about the age that most boys in small Texas towns were considered “ready” to learn about firearms and hunting, and to do so with their father or older brothers.
Two years later, he bought me a .410 shotgun and taught me how to hunt and field dress rabbits, which we then cooked up together. As a kid, some of my happiest, most poignant memories are tramping through East Texas woods and fields searching for small game.
But who actually took the photo?
This photograph is a snapshot taken by my mother’s Brownie camera and appears to have been shot during a Sunday afternoon drive. My dad, his brother, and I are clearly “dressed for church.” We were likely on the banks of the Sabine River. My dad often would put my rifle in our car’s trunk to retrieve for an impromptu target practice opportunity.
I've never known you to really care about guns that much. So how did you grow up to be a super-liberal gun control advocate instead of a gun-toting hunter?
For various reasons, I did not grow up to be a hunter. My interest in firearms only emerged when they took on the political valence they did in the late 60s and 70s, and the irrationality of many beliefs about guns became apparent to me.
As a student of argument, I was drawn to the disjunct between the "claims" about guns and the lack of rational evidence to support them. But I quickly realized that to talk about the rational use of guns sounds to many as a precursor to taking people's guns away. A lot of liberal rhetoric has that "tone."
My dad teaches my brother and I how to shoot. My brother is shown holding me steady while my dad watches.
You never pressured me on much of anything, including guns or hunting. You raised Ryan and I to be "bad Texans" who aren't obsessed with guns! What were you thinking?
Funny that I never thought about it that way. Growing up, my lack of obsession with guns was rather different from my cohorts in Kilgore and Bryan. I just had other interests. And of course getting a college education that focused on good literature (as an English major) and critical thinking (studying classical rhetoric) reinforced all that.
That "Traces of Texas" Facebook page with this photo got lots of comments from people saying that your dad "did it the right way" by introducing you to guns at a young age. Do you agree with that? We got something out of it, of course, but you think it's important to introduce kids to guns at all?
I think that many, if not most of those comments, reflected an assumption that the photograph depicted a boy who went on to become an active hunter. They projected onto the image what they thought could only be the case, as in "a boy that young, doing that (after church!) could only grow up to be a hunter like me."
You will notice that many of the responses were about how they got started at that age, when they received "their first rifle, etc." In a strange way, unintentionally, the photograph told them a lie about me.
You've spent a lot of your life documenting our family in photographs, many of which have provoked strong reactions from the people who see them. In this case, it's a photo of yourself taken by one of your parents that has attracted attention. Why do you think this image resonated with so many people?
I think many of the people felt validated by the image of a young boy that reflected a positive construct of their own early gun use.
As you know, the liberal lens in popular culture portrays gun use in today's society as generally a negative one. I have actually had people tell me that they "did not believe in guns!" That comes close to magical thinking.
I feel like, at least for us, the resonance of this photo is less about hunting and more about what it shows of our family.
Yes, I think so. My dad possessed a finely tuned intuitive sense of when to provide me experiences that he believed would contribute to my emotional and physical growth. How this parenting skill emerged from his own hard-scrabble youth on an East Texas sharecropper farm — I do not know.
Andrew McLemore is a journalist and photographer with more than a decade of experience covering the outdoors, government, education, and business. He is an editor and writer for GearJunkie and has worked at newspapers across Texas, including The Austin American-Statesman, The Dallas Morning News, and Fort Worth Weekly. Outside of work, McLemore is a musician, climber, and traveler, usually accompanied by his dog, Campana.