Corpus Christi Caller Times Caller.com - Choosing Light of Other Days photos a task

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Friday, July 16, 1999

Choosing Light of Other Days photos a task
Pictures from 1926-1959 make up majority of publication
Caller-Times

I have searched through many hundreds of photos and negatives in the past few months, searching for the right pictures to use in this section. In the end, the photos that appear were selected on a purely subjective basis. Some are historically important and others just tell about who we are and where we came from.
   I looked for the early photos (there are few of them) that show what the city was like 100 years ago or show what life was like for the people who lived then. You look at the old sepia-toned photos and say, "This is what life was like back then,'' or "This is what the city looked like when they celebrated the end of the 18th Century.'' But whatever the time period, the best photos, to my mind, are the simple ones, stark and unadorned and without the photographer's artifice. Sometimes the details outside the main focus of the camera are most interesting.
   The majority of the pictures in this section fall into the era between the opening of the port, 1926, and the opening of Harbor Bridge in 1959. This is the era when Corpus Christi went from being a small to a large city. In the first two decades after the port opened, Corpus Christi was about the size Alice is today. It was a small town.
   When the port opened, Louisiana was a ditch outside the city limits, Six Points was out in the country, and streetcars still ran downtown. Large reserves of natural gas were being discovered, but nobody had a use for the gas. There were few paved streets and the road to San Antonio was unmarked; a trip there could take all day. Each railroad still ran several passenger trains a day into and out of Corpus Christi. In the early 1930s, the bluff balustrade had been completed many years before, but there was nothing about the bayfront that would look familiar today. But the photos in this section capture other time periods; some of them date to before and right after the turn of the century.
   Almost all of the photos in this section come from the Caller-Times archives. A few came from the Corpus Christi Central Library; those photos also originally came from the Caller-Times. Many of the photos from the 1930s and early 1940s were taken by John Frederick (Doc) McGregor. He arrived here as a chiropractor in the 1920s and began taking photos to supplement his income. He was asked to take photos for the Caller-Times, which had no staff photographer back then, and some of his photos began to appear in the newspaper. But they were rare.
   In those days, photos had to be sent to San Antonio for engraving and were often published days after the events they chronicled. Because of the expense and time lag and perhaps because editors placed a lower value on local news back then, many of McGregor's shots never appeared in print. The negatives were stored in the darkroom, many of them unlabeled and unidentified, for decades. We have sorted through many of those and some of them appear in this section.
   The information for the cutlines of the photos that were previously unpublished presented a challenge. We ran a photo each Monday under the "Celebrate 2000'' heading and many readers responded, giving us names for unknown faces and dates for events. Others required some digging in archives to verify places and dates and happenings.
   Other photos in the section have appeared in the paper before or in other photo books, including "The Building of Corpus Christi'' and "A Picture Postcard History'' by Anita Eisenhauer and Gigi Starnes. Some appeared in the Caller-Times' Centennial Journey, published in 1983.
   Lastly, I guess the title should be explained. It struck me that photographs from the past are like the light from a distant star that reaches us long after the star's death. Photos capture a scene from the past in a moment of time, a brief flash of light preserved for the future long after the people shown have died. The historical images caught on the negatives represent, as the title says, the light of other days.



Viewpoints Editor Murphy Givens can be reached at 886-4315 or by e-mail at givensm@caller.com

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