Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 2011
Document Type
Article
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly 31:2 (Spring 2011).
Abstract
There are at least 2,000 silver nitrate negatives in the Horace Poolaw collection, and as many stories to go along with them. If you begin to talk about one image, it leads from that story to the next, and the next, and pretty soon two or three hours have gone by. Rather than discussing in detail the images in the Horace Poolaw collection, I would like to discuss Horace Poolaw the man-a complex yet loving individual who was much more than just a photographer. It is still difficult for me to talk about a person whose influence helped shape my life.
Our family referred to Horace Poolaw simply as "Granpa." Part of my research on Granpa was gifted to me as a child and teenager: I learned about my grandfather by sitting on his lap watching the Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights, by riding with him on his tractor at sundown to check on his cattle (a necessary ritual before he settled in for the night), by following his footsteps through the early morning frost on our way to feed his pigs. That handful of pigs had it made. Granpa would get up early in the morning and warm some water on the stove in a big stew pot. Outside he had a bucket filled with sweet feed that he mixed with the water. We'd carry the feed seventy-five yards to the pig pen and he would pour the feed into the trough with steam rising. Those pigs would go nuts.
Comments
Copyright © 2011 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.