My last story of life’s experiences

    This is the story of the “Lost Sheep”, as it were. Let me explain this. I was born 77 years ago in Miami and at that time my mother had me baptized as a catholic. I didn’t have much of an experience growing up as a catholic. We only went to church on Easter Sundays up to the age of about 11.

    A friend of my mother's was Catholic and convinced her that I should get more involved in the church and I did. I entered a Catholic school from 5th grade to 12th grade. However, for me personally, I felt that it was way too much structured religious education in that it was centered on grooming children to become nuns and priests, and I had no inclination to enter the priesthood.

    On December 24th, 1961 during the Christmas break of my senior year, an auto accident happened that nearly killed me. Some of the events during those first few weeks/months of a long recovery period, for me anyway, were that of those events ended up turning me away from my faith and the catholic church, but somehow never from God.

    The remarkable recovery from that accident could not have been without the help of God. I know this now but at that time I had put God/Church on hold in my life. Youth and bodybuilding were on my side no doubt in the healing process. However, when you’re so close to death that you could actually see yourself about to cross over from within a foggy haze, and the feeling of floating near the ceiling looking back at yourself in your hospital room, there was something very haunting going on. When the EMTs brought me into the hospital, I remembered a nurse in the emergency room talking to my parents on the day of the accident telling them to get to the hospital as quickly as possible as I was probably not going to recover from this accident. I was in and out mostly as the intense pain kept me quiet..or it was finally the pain shot that I kept asking for.

    I’m not sure if it was an out-of-body experience that I felt later that first night as everything seemed as though I was in a deep fog, or perhaps it could have been the drugs, or it was my pulling out a tube from my nose. I didn't realize it went down into my stomach. I thought that it was only in my nose and it was burning and bothering me. Once I started to remove that tube there was no going back. Freaked out the on-duty nurse for sure.

    A few days later, as I was told, I woke up to see a priest standing over me giving me the Last Rights. I told the priest that I really didn’t think I needed that, but the priest said to be calm my son; just then I passed out again.  I felt myself floating from the ceiling and it felt like I was in a blue/gray fog. A few days later I had another similar experience…only this time there were doctors and nurses all around my bed and I could hear the doctor yell “Clear”. I saw my body jump violently off the bed. I had flatlined as a result of too much Demerol, a very strong painkiller that was used to keep me nearly comatose. This was New Year's Eve. A young nurse came in to give me the Demerol shot as her shift was ending, and before she was able to withdraw the needle I went into convolutions. She was supposed to get on a flight to New York to be with her boyfriend for New Year's. This was when all of the doctors and nurses came in with the crash cart to bring me back to life. This was also the second or third time during that first week that I saw myself nearly cross over the "Big Threshold". Once again, I felt myself floating near the ceiling and watching this event unfold in front of me through a gray/blue haze. This is now getting very Real and Erie, and it was freaking me out. This was not the common thing you hear people talk about going down a dark tunnel to a bright light and someone or something is telling you to go back. But let me tell you that seeing yourself lying in bed from above is very strange.

    All of the doctors, especially the neurosurgeon and the orthopedic surgeon were very concerned with the amount of lower lumbar spine damage. They did not want me awake or to move around at all. There were over 23 broken bones and a few fractures, a severe hematoma on my left hip, and numerous internal soft tissue damage with internal organs shifted out of place. I guess the major concern was that 3 of my lumbar vertebrae and my spinal cord were severely shifted laterally and twisted. There were 20 broken bones in just the lower back which could have easily resulted in total paralysis from the waist down. Another miracle from heaven?? I guess I had my guardian angel working overtime the first week.

    So to fast forward a bit, during the second week when the Demerol was stopped, and I was able to talk to the orthopedic surgeon, I was told that I probably wouldn’t be able to walk for at least 12 months…if I were to walk again at all. The second week I went into surgery for repair work on my right femur, which was completely broken in three places. Thankfully my orthopedic surgeon didn’t like using metal plates and screws. He chose instead to use heavy weights to pull the leg and the muscles and push the bones back into place using a fluoroscope, a continuous X-ray machine. The leg was in a weird splint with a steel pin through my knee with an overhead traction bar. What the orthopedic surgeon didn’t tell me was that I would be still strapped down to that wooden board.. the same board that was used when they scraped me up off the ground at the crash site. This was needed to keep me in-mobilized until the leg bones healed and then the doctors would be able to figure out what they were going to do about the broken back. This was initially to take about 8 weeks...I was healed enough in 4 weeks.

    So the day came to go into surgery for the lower back. I was not told what the doctors were going to do to me. I woke up to see that I was now an albino turtle. There was a cast from my left leg at the knee up to my chest and back down to my right toe with a wooden bar between the knees to keep everything in place. After a week or so they sent me home to heal with X-rays taken every 2 weeks. The doctors were totally amazed at how quickly I was healing. I went back to the hospital to have the cast removed and measured for a leg and brace. I sat up in bed for the first time in two and a half months. The braces came and we suited up and with crutches and two large orderlies took my first step since the accident. After a few days of pogoing up and down the halls of the hospital, I was released to go home a few days before Easter... some 8 months earlier than what the doctors had initially told me. The orthopedic surgeon told me that had I had been a medium build person, I would have never lived through that accident. I guess that at 5ft. 9 inches and 210 lbs with legs like a raging bull, the chest of an elephant, and arms like small trees is what brought me through this, and the kind hand of God. This was His plan, not mine... I was just along for the ride.

    Speaking of the crash site, when I was told what happened in that crash by the guys I was hunting with, that this was surely a miracle that happened that morning. That crash should have killed me outright from the impact alone. Had I not been of a large bone-structured body, played football, and all of the skin/scuba diving that I had done before, I would have/should have died that morning. To give some perspective of how horrific that crash was, the battery of the car that ran into the back of the car that I was getting out of was found in the middle of the highway some 300 feet from the site of the impact of that crash. Yep! That driver that caused this crash never knew my car was there…no brake squalling…no warning, just "BANG"!  Had I heard brakes squalling, I maybe could have jumped out of the way. There were no glass windows left in either car. I was hit from the back as I was getting out of the car that I had hitchhiked in to get gas for our car. That impact, which was from the car I was getting out of, initially threw me backward into a tree and out ahead of that car. I felt the sensation of flying through the air and landed on the sloping canal bank facing back towards the highway. I looked up to see the entire underside of the car coming down on top of me. I remembered trying to roll out of the way. That car must have come down on top of me and spun me around 180 degrees. I watched that same car take 2 bounces and then fly threw the air and go violently into the water. I remember seeing the guy come up to the surface. When I tried to raise up on my elbows I felt tremendous pain in my lower back. I didn’t even know that my leg was underneath me. My hunting buddies came over and kept me down and calm. I passed out and woke up when I was being loaded into the ambulance. Another perspective of this crash was where the 2 vehicles had collided, the force was such that the frames of both vehicles dug a large hole through the asphalt and down below the road base... about 10 inches deep x 12 inches wide and 13 feet long. I was the worst of the 6 people in that crash and I don’t remember much of the long ride to the hospital some 75 miles away. You know, I have been told that God assigns each of us at the moment of conception, a guardian angel to watch over us until our death. I wasn’t going to let my guardian angel off that easy on this day. He or she was needed to work overtime... and they have done just that.

    So my conversation with the orthopedic surgeon whet like ??... well, I won’t elaborate on my words but I did say to him that there was no way in hell that I was not going to walk again for at least a year.  My orthopedic surgeon was totally amassed that my rehabilitation/healing process healed so quickly that it only took me less than 4 months. I was walking 3 days before Easter. Another miracle? Kinda reminds me of another miracle that happened nearly 2,000 years ago at about this same time. 

   So life moved forward and I was accepted by the draft board for military service in 1966. I was injured in basic training and subsequently honorably released from military duties that same year. I eventually got married and had a son in 1970. I never ever regretted either of those two blessed events, but I did regret not having been married in a Catholic Church, and I regretted never having my son baptized at birth, something I need to work on before I leave this life.

    Fast forward again, after 49 years with my wife and my best friend in life, she was diagnosed in 2015 with stage four lung cancer and passed away in 2016. I found myself alone, and if it were not for our dog Suzie, who we adopted as a runaway from our local animal shelter, I would probably not be here today writing this story. Suzie was my little rock and the glue that held me together. I lost Suzie two years later to the same lung cancer, in the same right lung as my wife. I eventually had to let her cross over that Rainbow Bridge, which was every bit as devastating as the loss of my wife. How can our pets mean that much to us? So now I was nearly alone again. We had a cat and he too died of cancer a year later. You find yourself having no one or animal to talk to and believe me when I say we do talk to our animals. There is comfort in doing so. They give us comfort and joy that is never-ending.

    I kept asking God…why not me?... why my wife?... she had more to give than I. What do you want me to do…just give me a sign and I will do it… or just let me go. So now 3 years later, in October of 2019, I made the decision to return to my faith and the Catholic Church. I had 4 Catholic churches in my general location and did a web search on all of them. After reading over the various priests' bios, I felt a very strong connection to one priest in particular at St. Charles Borromeo. I tried to set up an appointment to sit down with him to discuss my life’s events and how to return to my catholic faith. I was to leave on a camping trip in my 24-foot camping trailer in just a few days. However, since that strong connection was felt with that particular priest, I only wanted to sit down with him. I had sent him an email about the reason why I wanted to sit down with him and signed the email as “The Lost Sheep”, which is how this story began. His calendar was full and I was unable to see him until after I returned from my trip. I hadn’t sensed an urgency to go to confession until after I had left on this trip and the more I drove, that urgency became more real. I had over 60 years of sins to confess and I became very concerned that “what if”…I were to die in yet another auto accident. I again tried to find a church and a priest along the route of my trip but came up empty. This trip had taken me up through the Florida Panhandle, north to northern Alabama then east to northern Georgia, and eventually back south to home. I tried to read up and did many web searches about being able to confess directly to God and receive the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. It was an unusual circumstance but from what I found in my web searches was that it was acceptable as long as I saw a priest as soon as possible. With the number of auto accidents (5) that I had been in, I needed to do something quickly, as I had 2 days of steady driving to get back home. I did not want to go out in a blaze of non-glory in yet another auto accident without having gone to confession and receiving the Holy Eucharist.

    After returning back home I went to the next Sunday Mass at St. Charles. As soon as I entered that (my) church and saw the interior architecture I knew immediately that this was going to be home and that I had to find a way to get permission to capture what I had seen into a panoramic image.  I wanted to have a large print on canvas made and give it to my chosen priest. That event took place in June of the following year.  I have met many very pleasant people over the years but none as much so as when I came home to St. Charles Borromeo and I feel very blessed for this new but obviously shorter chapter in my Life’s Events. The image below is a 180-degree panoramic sweep that was made from 14 separate vertical images, that when stitched together in Photoshop and with a few corrections yielded an image file capable of a ten-foot-long print. This image was printed six feet long by 2 feet high. This small photo below does no justice to what is hanging on a wall.

    Over the last 46 years, I have been considered by many to be a very good nature and wildlife photographer. However, since the loss of my wife, I have lost my thirst for photography and my recent images on my last road trip showed that lack of the talent that I once had. I have tried numerous times to go out and photograph but my usual talents were missing in the images that I came back with. 

    I have managed 2 positive milestones in my life, both of which I am very proud of since the passing of my wife, whom I miss very much. The first was finding my way back to God, my Faith, and the Catholic Church, and the second was successfully making the St. Charles Church’s interior photo at Christmas and giving the print to my priest. This print is displayed in the administrative offices. My next milestone is to perhaps someday reshoot this same interior image as a non-seasonal theme and have another canvas print made for me.  That one is hopefully still in the making.

    So … the “Lost Sheep” is now known as  “The Found Old Goat”, and that title will follow me to my final resting place with my wife by my side once again.

 

“The Old Goat Photographer”

    Glorify God with your life

J. Michael

How I met my wife and how She changed my life.

    I met my wife quite by accident, although her sister and her husband have been trying to pair us up for several months after a recent breakup. I was in no real hurry to find another woman at that time and kinda just kept putting off several meetings that had been planned for us. I needed to get one of my spearguns from Carmen's (the soon-to-be brother-in-law) house and I thought that nobody was at home but Sis (what my wife called her sister). She was there and let me in to get the speargun. We were talking in the living room when Darleth (my soon-to-be-wife) came down the stairs wearing cut off jeans and a tube top with a pack of cigarettes stuck in the top, a can of paint in one hand, and a paintbrush in the other with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. Sis laughed a bit and said well this is a fine first meeting of you two. I was quite dumbfounded at first and had a strange feeling come over me when I first saw her. Darleth was in a near panic but came all the way down the stairs and said hi. Sis and Carmen had told Darleth all about me in a manner that she thought that I was married to this other girl. I have to admit that touch of paint on her arms and face gave a different aire to our first meeting.

    A couple of weeks later Carmen and Sis said why don’t we go to a drive-in movie. Darleth and I agreed. That same day, Carmen, Doug my childhood buddy that lived two houses down from me when growing up, we're going out to do some spearfishing. Doug, (my soon-to-be Best Man) was a fair spear fisherman as was Carmen. We had gone out in Carmen’s boat early that morning and spent the entire day on the water. Darleth continued painting a bedroom and went outside to get some sun and fell asleep. Needless to say, both of us were burnt to a crisp and could barely sit back in the seat. It was not the best of first dates for sure.

    After a month or so things began to heat up and gel into a relationship of sorts. Carmen and Sis suggested that we go out on the boat, take some food and cooking equipment and spend the night out on the water and go diving the next morning. Now you have to picture this; the boat had folding back-to-back seats that when folded down makes into a lounge bed about 28 inches wide and 6 foot long, one on each side of the boat. How two grown people can attempt to sleep together on that narrow of a bed was tricky at best, with a lot of tossing and nearly falling off several times that night. I gave Darleth the inside and I tried to balance myself as best I could. Talk about building the pressure of a new relationship in very close quarters.

    We made it somehow and dawn broke, finally. We made coffee and made something to eat and headed offshore to the reefs for some spearfishing for dinner back at home that night. The girls got in the water but were scared off by a very large school of some good-sized barracudas. I never paid them much attention to barracudas but after several fish were speared and brought to the boat the sharks showed up. We moved to some other small patch reefs and got a few more snapper and the sharks showed up again. The girls said can we go in closer to shore in shallow water so they could swim without sharks and barracudas. So we went in close to shore in about 3 feet of water…no sense of taking a speargun with me in that shallow of water. So we all got in and just swam around for about 30 minutes. Darleth pointed out several small brightly colored tropical fish and asked if I could catch one of those. Sure thing. I went back to the boat and got a small dip net and proceeded to catch one or two of those colorful tropical fish. I had no idea what they were but took them back to the boat and found a bucket, got some water, and put the fish in the bucket. I went back and Darleth found some other fish..different colored and I caught two of those. So Carmen wanted to get into the act and so he caught one or two of yet a different variety. So sitting in the boat looking at the fish swimming around in the bucket, Darleth asked could we keep them?? I said well, maybe, if I could find my 20-gallon aquarium back in storage at my parent's house. So we emptied one cooler and added water, I got some sand off the bottom and found a few pieces of coral and some plants. And so now my saltwater tropical fish hobby began at my wife’s suggestion, "could we keep them"? One of many hobbies that were yet to come that would shape my lifestyle over the next 49 years.

    Our relationship grew into love and soon engagement. Spearfishing and hunting were well entrenched in my previous life that I didn’t need any help in keeping those activities alive. In fact, Darleth loved camping and accompanied me on many hunting and fishing trips for the next years of our life together. I quickly found out that she was a much better fisherman than I, most probably because her dad would take her to Goodland Island near Marco on the west coast of Florida where he gill netted and she fished with a rod and reel beginning at an early age of 8.

    We were married on August 17,1967 with a boatload of friends and family. We went to a private freshwater lake in upstate Florida for our honeymoon where there would be more than ample bass fishing. There were only two small 2 room cottages for rent on the entire lake. I had been there many times before with my parents on vacations and later on a couple of trips with some buddies that I worked with. At that time we took my boat for waterskiing and a small outboard motor on a wooden skiff for bass fishing. For our honeymoon, we took my dad’s boat and that same small outboard motor for fishing. My wife just had to outfish me. During the week's stay, we took the boat over to the Ocklawaha River at Moss Bluff and went north up to the Silver River and on into Silver Springs. I had made this trip back in high school and thought it would make for a good outing. That area on the river was used for many of the Tarzan movies of the ’50s and another movie, The Yearling, which was where we stopped for lunch.

    Since we had very little money between us we agreed to stay with my parents trying to save up for a house. Two years later my son was born. My brother-in-law, Carmen, and I tried our hand at full-time marine tropical fish and coral collecting. We could sell everything we could collect and send to New York but we would need a bigger boat to go to the Bahamas (Bimini), which is only 55 miles east of Miami, Florida. We bought a used 25-foot boat with twin Volvos, 120 HP inboard/outboard motors. We made several trips to Bimini when we found out the hull had a large crack, which was covered up with new bottom paint from the dealer before we bought it. That whole deal went very south and we got rid of that boat and I went back to work at the same engineering firm I had just left 4 months prior. We now had about 25 aquariums set up at both houses for keeping marine fish, coral, and invertebrates for shipping. We continued to ship all we could get using Carmen’s boat locally but couldn’t make the Bimini trip in an 18-foot boat safely. So we could only fill orders on our local fish. So that venture went by the wayside and so I set up a custom marine aquarium business building custom size aquariums for businesses. That spilled over to personal clients in their homes. That lasted a few more years and I just dove and collected for myself and a yearly Marine Aquarium Society that I had just joined. 

    This aquarium group had an annual aquarium show where the members would bring their aquariums to the show location for the exhibition. The first show that I entered I had made two 30 gallon hexagonal aquariums with custom backgrounds and wooden stands/tops with hidden filtration systems in the lighted hood. One aquarium had smaller marine fish that swam in and out of the holes in a centered rock-covered background. That aquarium could be viewed from all 6 sides. The base was 8 inches larger than the aquarium. I put the same sand in and around the outside wooden base of the tank. The interior bottom appeared to extend out beyond the aquarium. The second aquarium had the background at the back with the filtration pipes hidden behind it. I had caught a Black French Angel that was about 6 inches tall. That was a very beautiful fish with each scale of its side edged in a bright gold color. This was the only fish in the aquarium and I placed tall plastic wide-bladed plants in with the fish. I had made up a 6 ft by 6 ft backdrop that was behind the two aquariums. The backdrop had netting and dried horseshoes and dried sea fans and shells in the netting. That made for a nice display that was separated from most of the other side-by-side displays. My display was the last display in the show. Later that day before after I was completely set up and before the judging that night, a woman came over to me and said the judges will never go for plastic freshwater plants in a marine aquarium in a very sarcastic manner. I didn’t know that she was the wife of that year’s club president. 

    I was overwhelmed after the judging to see three first-place trophies and 2 second-place plaques on top of my aquariums. One was Best overall display, Best custom aquarium system, and the fish won Best overall marine fish. I also received second place in two of those same categories. I later found out that the three judges fought over if my display should be awarded Best in Show. They finally had to come to an agreement that I really had two separate aquariums and the Best of Show trophy was to go to only one aquarium. Needless to say that the newcomer nearly pulled off the entire show. The woman came back over with her husband spitting out black feathers. We became good friends later on. After a couple of yearly week-long summer diving trips to Grand Cayman with the aquarium group, many of the divers could see that my dive partner and I really knew how to catch marine tropical fish. We gave away fish to those people that were not very good divers and yet had aquariums that they wanted to bring to the aquarium show.

    After winning the respect of the club members and the board, those efforts later turned into being the vice-president one year and the yearly aquarium show chairman the following year. We had all kinds of donated door prizes for the people that paid to come to view the 2-day aquarium show. We also trophies for the people that brought their marine aquariums to the weekend show. When I became the show chairman I wanted to do something for the exhibitors. So I set out to obtain prizes for the people that took their time to bring their aquariums from home and set them up for the show. When I set out to do something…I do it BIG. Our aquarium society had made 3 yearly week-long trips to Grand Cayman to dive for tropical fish for the yearly aquarium show. We also had booked the next year's trip in advance. So when I became the aquarium show chairman I called the hotel where we stayed and the airlines and was able to get a week package, room/meals, and flight tickets for two people as the main grand prize for the exhibitors. I was also able to get some aquarium products from some of the vendors that I used. I called in a couple of favors from two marine fish stores in South Miami and got some marine fish and invertebrates as prizes along with a host of other things. That next marine aquarium show was the largest event with over 200 aquariums entered that year…the largest turnout that they ever had. The entire aquarium board members were dumbfounded that I was able to pull off such a feat. Every person that brought in their marine aquariums to exhibit that year was given one ticket for the exhibitor's raffle. We had nearly 60 gift prizes. I was so busy during the start of the raffle getting attendees out of the building so that the exhibitors could begin taking down their aquariums. So I had my diving partner draw my ticket at the end of the day for the grand prize only. If he drew my name for any of the other prizes I told him to put my ticket back in the basket. The main prize was left for last and just as I walked in the door, I told Harry to pick out a winning ticket for me. We joked earlier that if either one of us won that grand prize we would take the other one on the next year's trip for a week in Grand Caymen. I was busy doing paperwork when Harry drew my ticket for the main prize and he had a grin on his face that lit up the room. Everybody knew what had just happened and I didn’t even see him pull the ticket. The entire room went up in a roar and applause and Harry pointed at me from across the room and held up the winning ticket. I said no way… I said that I could not accept that prize… I was the one that obtained it... but everyone in that room said I deserved it for all of the hard work and hours that I put in on that show… so we went the next year.

    Aquariums and diving for marine tropical fish and invertebrates on long extended trips to the Florida keys with the kids and the women camping was just part of how my wife influenced my life. Diving camping fishing and hunting became a way of our lives for many years to come. However, she had one more surprise for me a few years later…and that was photography…little did she know she unleashed a monster.

    It was Christmas time and my wife had absolutely no idea what to get me for Christmas. My diving partner who was heavily into photography said to get him a 35MM camera. So she did just that. This was back in 1974 and the cameras at that time had no automatic anything. You had to learn which controls to turn and when and I was intimidated but within a few days, I got the hang of it. When I switched to color slides I really began to understand how each control worked with the other. You can see the slide get brighter or darker. With shooting negatives the processing machine can compensate if your exposure is off a bit and you really don’t know what you did wrong or right.

    Well, within a month or so I bought 2 more lenses and later added 2 or 3 more. I borrowed a friend's camera that was identical to mine and so now I had 2 cameras and more equipment than my camera bag could hold. I didn’t photograph people very well… I did a couple of weddings... hated doing those but made some extra money. I mainly preferred to photograph nature and wildlife. 

    A friend that I worked with had a small darkroom and he was interested in making color prints directly from color slides, a somewhat new process at that time for Kodak and a company called CibaChrome. So we spent quite a few nights at his place learning the process and making what I thought were some nice small 8 x10 photographs. I had a spare bedroom and decided I wanted a darkroom of my own. I bought a used enlarger and the equipment to make color prints from 8x10 and later added the equipment to do 11 x14 and 16x20 prints. Then bought various sizes of developing trays and a new color enlarger to make B&W prints mas well. I really loved making B&W prints. 

    At the insistence of one of my wife’s friends who was also a photographer and was a member of a camera club, she said I should also join. So I joined the Dagguere Pictorialists Camera Club. The very first meeting I attended was a monthly print contest. So I brought 3 of my 16x20 B&W matted prints and won all three awards,1st, 2nd and 3rd place with one of the B&W prints winning the best print of that month. This upset many of the old-timers that were accustomed to always winning. I think I may have also won 1 of the color print categories as well that night. Needless to say, I came on that scene with a bang. Later on, that lead to being the president of that club for 3 years.  

    So after a couple of years and a few thousand color slides later I came upon a Southern Bell Telephone book cover and knew the photographer that made that image and said to myself, I have better images than that. So I set out to find who in Southern Bell that I could set up a meeting to show some of my images. I mainly just wanted to see if I could get a telephone book cover for myself. I found the gentlemen, who said he inherited the job of choosing photos for book covers but he didn’t like doing that as that was not his main job. I thought great. So I asked a few questions as to what type of photos he needed for covers and where in Florida did he have a need for photos. With a couple of answers, I set up a meeting and took some sliders and a projector and screen, and actually managed to get it all up to his office in downtown Miami for a dog and pony show. He was impressed but he could not make any promises. I now had where he needed photos and the sizes of the local area-wide books and set out to photograph a couple of days in each area and then set up another meeting, only this time with less equipment as someone in his office had everything if needed.

    I did a little homework on pricing/usage for various sizes of photos and where the photos were going to be located within a book and what type of publication and the circulation rates. I had no idea it was going to be that complicated, but I had my photo rates ready for our meeting just in case he asked. That first year I was able to get the main large telephone book for general Miami, and another 2 images that could be used generically up and down the east coast…that was West Palm Beach down to the Florida Keys. Three front cover images netted me about $1500.00. I now needed to get better more professional quality cameras and lenses. $1500.00 wasn't near enough to cover all of the equipment that I wanted or needed. So for the next 3 years and about 20 covers later, I had new equipment, the best of the best. I even bought an old-time folding 1930’s 4x5 press view camera, which I used mostly used for B&W photography. Now I needed a bigger enlarger for the much larger negative (4”x5”) and learning the fine art of true B&W photography. That got real complicated.

    After a couple of more years of telephone book covers, about 10 more, I now had some extra money to burn and decided that since my wife had unleashed this beast with photography, that I would surprise her with new wedding rings, ones that you could actually see the diamonds. So that Christmas it was my turn for a big gift for her and I had my camera and flash ready the moment she opened the box. That may have been my very best photograph of her.

    A NASA launch of the space shuttle was scheduled for the following summer and I really wanted photos of that big bird taking off. So I went up to the best location I could find which was well outside the boundaries of the NASA property. The location was on US Highway One and along the Indian River. This was a little over 12 miles away from the launchpad. I had rented an 800MM lens from Canon and set my tripod out the night before the launch next to my van where I spent the night. Morning came along with a mass of people that came in all night long we were all ready for the early morning launch. A heavy cloud cover moved in over the launch pad and all I got were maybe 15 frames before the shuttle disappeared into the clouds. “That’s All Folks".  At that moment I knew I needed to find a way to get into the NASA complex as a press photographer and within a month I found it. I was looking at one of the Southern Bell telephone books that had just come out, and there was my photo on the cover. This photo was solicited by one of the great-grandchildren of the original Monroe family that had a home on Biscayne Bay. this early 1900's 2 story cracker style home was on a National Monument Register of Historic Places. I met her when photographing on the grounds and she requested a slide of what I had captured. I said, of course, not knowing her intentions. As it turned out she knew the same gentleman that I was working with at Southern Bell and gave him the slide to be used on the local area telephone book. I had stamped my name and telephone number on the cardboard side of the slide so she knew that I still had rights for that image. The woman never told the gentleman from Southern Bell that my name was on the slide and he never looked. I called my Southern Bell contact the next day and asked him how did my photo get selected for the Coral Gables telephone book when I had never submitted it to him. After a few moments of silence and he said, OK, what is this going to cost me? He knew he was in trouble using my photo without my permission and signed paperwork. I immediately thought of NASA and I said a letter...more dead silence on the phone for a moment. I explained what I wanted and we hashed out the particulars and I now had my letter to submit to NASA for the press credentials to getting on the NASA property as a press photographer. 

    A lot of work and research went into getting cameras ready with building electronic auto triggering systems and timers and watertight housings to protect the cameras. There are the cameras that were set up remotely around the launch complex for different angles of the shuttle taking off from the launch pad. When everybody is ready to go out to the pad you have to go by NASA busses to different sites. I had 4 remote camera locations picked out and one camera with me at the VIP/Press viewing site which was only 3 miles from the launch pad 30A.  The next morning everybody in the press core that was filming the launch were all set up next to the countdown clock. When the clock and announcer said 15 seconds, we got behind our cameras for the biggest, loudest event I have ever witnessed. The sound and the ground shaking under my feet was when that shuttle lifted off and cleared the tower was something I will always remember. Over the next 3 years, I covered many launches including the Challenger’s first dawn launch and later that same week the first landing at Cape Kennedy. The photo of the dawn launch was printed and matted and framed to 20x24 inches as soon as I got back home and took it back up within 6 days and was hanging in the press center the last time I was there. I was selected to cover the first shuttle landing at Cape Kennedy, which was Challenger that had just taken off days prior. Those images of launches, landing, and moving the shuttle on the mobile launcher, “roll out” at dawn to the 3 mile run to the launchpad are some of the most memorial images to date. The sheer size of that thing was immense. I was initially scheduled to cover the disastrous loss of Challenger that chilly February morning but could not get off work.

    In 1985 I moved our family from Miami to Punta Gorda and watched the house that I designed being built and completed in 1986, I once again made my darkroom, which was a bit larger this time. I processed my B&W films and printed large 32x40 framed B&W prints and then added sepia-toned color to them for a light golden brown that depicted early Florida 500 years ago. Some 15 years later in 2000, we sold our home to move out to Colorado where my son’s family (4-year-old granddaughter ) had moved to in 1997. My wife was shocked that I would sell my house, the one that I had dreamed about long before I had met her, but we did. We lived in Longmont, CO.  north of Denver and closer to the mountains for a couple of years before moving back to Punta Gorda to help my aging parents. My son and his family decided to move back to their home in Punta Gorda as well. I loved the mountains and the snow. Before I left Florida I sold all of my film cameras and lenses for the purchase of a digital camera and a computer, which was a real learning experience working on photos without the smell of chemicals. I missed that smell.

    So after knowing my wife of 49 years, having a son with 2 granddaughters, and buying another home close to them again in 2003 so grandma could spoil the girls at all of the theme parks in Orlando, we found out in September of 2015 that my wife had stage 4 lung cancer. We were devastated, to say the least… it was a complete shock. My wife did smoke for about 25 years early in life but when we moved into the newly designed and built home she completely stopped for the last 30 years. The damage was done, however. I have always worried and still do about secondhand smoke for my son when he was growing up. My wife passed away in the summer of 2016 and now I'm all alone.

    After a few years, I kept asking the big question “WHY NOT ME”? My wife had so much more to give to our family than I did. After searching for answers and what was I going to do, I decided in 2018 that I would return to my childhood Catholic faith for some answers. I had been away from the church for nearly 60 years, but God waited on me. I still look for the answers to “Why” to this day. So after finding the perfect church and meeting some fine priests to talk to I have found some peace... for now. I guess the day that I leave this earth I will finally receive the answer to my question.

J. Michael