Old Man Edwards

All I ever knew him as was “Old Man Edwards.” He lived just behind our house when I was growing up in Paris.

To us kids, he was something of a mystery—an eccentric old man with a gift for carpentry. Day after day, under the hot sun, he built small clapboard shacks, only to tear them down and start again. Nothing was wasted. He saved every board, every nail. I don’t recall ever seeing him throw a single one away.

As I remember, he had been a World War I veteran. Back then, they called it “shell shock”—what we now understand as PTSD. Even as a boy, I had the sense that his constant building and rebuilding was more than habit. It felt like something deeper… maybe his way of keeping the war at a distance, of quieting whatever memories followed him home.

Despite his solitude, he lived well. He grew his own food in large, carefully tended gardens. His property was always mowed and neat. He was a kind man in his own way, though private—and he didn’t take kindly to neighborhood kids wandering onto his land. Because of that, he carried a bit of a reputation among us.

One day, just after Christmas, everything changed—at least for us boys. Mr. Edwards had plowed under his gardens, leaving behind a wide, open field. We had all just gotten new football uniforms, but nowhere to play. Somehow, my friends convinced me to be the one to ask him if we could use his land.

To my surprise—and theirs—he said yes.

Years later, in the late sixties, I was in college taking a photojournalism class. I went back to Mr. Edwards and asked if I could photograph him and his carpentry work for an assignment. Once again, he agreed.

I think I knew, even then, that I wanted to preserve something of him. He had been such a constant presence throughout my childhood and teenage years. I saw him nearly every day. He would bring us vegetables from his garden. My father took him into town when he needed it, and each year, Dad examined his eyes and made sure he had proper glasses.

The digital paintings you see now come from two black-and-white photographs I took that day—images that were, at the time, overexposed and unremarkable. My journalism professor would be amazed to know that, fifty years later, those same flawed photos could be transformed into something meaningful… something that finally does justice to the man I knew simply as Old Man Edwards.