Some photos by (and of) Bob Stepno
String section
Hartford's New England Fiddle
Contest in the 1970s left me and thousands of
listeners with great memories,
and I was glad to hear it was coming back in 1999.
The backstage jam on the left
became my most-published photo. The Hartford Courant, where I was
a reporter, not a photographer, bought a copy to accompany an article
about the next year's contest. Then I gave a copy to the Peace
Train Foundation to help promote the contest, and they printed up a boxfull,
complete with my name on the front.
The New York Times used the shot two years in a row as
a Peace Train publicity photo, as did several New England papers and
magazines (generally with no credit). However, with the revived fiddle
contest
back in action, organizer Paul LeMay not only
requested the picture again for his press kit and history of
the contest Web sites, he also saw to it that the Times gave
me a credit line on the photo, one of several it used to preview the
year 2000 contest, 22 years later! (Thanks, Paul!)
Another shot from the same afternoon -- of a young fiddler learning a tune from one of his elders -- was published in the now-defunct Pickin' magazine as part of a photo contest. My prize was a set of how-to-play-the-banjo instruction tapes that my 1980s neighbors may still regret. I've never come close to the wizardry of Roger Sprung, the backstage banjo virtuoso in the jam session photo. And I don't even have a picture of myself playing the banjo, but, for the record, the photo on the right is a portrait of the photographer with his oldest guitar (a Martin from 1924) in front of his oldest computer (an Osborne1 from 1982).
Wind section
While
I'm in
the ancient archives, on the left
is my Dad's
photo of
me on the scene of my first hurricane, in Westerly, R.I., in the 1950s.
Dad was
another photographer named Bob Stepno (someday maybe I'll make a
Web page of his World War II photos), but I seem to attract more
hurricanes.
My storm photo-wreckage experience was Hurricane Bob, which blew in a few
decades
later, piling up boats along the Southern New England coast when I worked for
Soundings, the boating
newspaper. One day I was covering the Fools' Rules Regatta, with people
putting together homemade boats on the Jamestown, R.I., beach; the next
morning
some much more substantial yachts were piled on the sand.
The first pictures ran in Soundings' Trade Only, a special edition of the magazine for people in the boat business. The hurricane was a disaster for boat owners, but actually may have helped some struggling boatyards by giving them repair business during an economically rough year. And, ill wind or not, the pictures from Jamestown gave a headline writer a chance to put my name in bigger type than usual.
That was enough of hurricanes for me, but I moved to North Carolina in time for Hurricane Fran to chase after me 100 miles inland to Chapel Hill. I didn't take a single picture.
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