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The Vachel Blair Issue by Doniphan Blair
Vachel Blair, enjoying a train ride in Poland, in 1997. photo: N. Blair
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NOTE: There are five articles or stories by or about Vachel Blair listed at the bottom.
AS I HELP CLOSE UP MY PARENT'S NEW
York apartment and sort through my father’s archives, I feel his presence quite closely, certainly more than the last decade, as he faded from mind after dying in 1999, perhaps more than ever.
That's because I'm reading his notes, articles and old letters, including from his girlfriends and two wives, many of whom were passionately in love with him. That reveals more than one can glean from a father-son relationship, even though he was a generous father and we became good friends after I came of age.
Indeed, those personal revelations allow me to see Vachel Lindsay Blair as he really was: a young man in a brutal fight for democracy in Spain, an intelligence officer in World War Two, when he did "bomb run" photography, wrote stories about the airmen, and made friends in Egypt, Libya and Italy, a dedicated student of film in New York but especially during his year in Paris at the Ecole Technique de Photographie, and as a filmmaker coming up in New York.
Reading his resumes, job application letters, discussions of film projects and thumbing through many scripts, I learned the answer to what I thought was a lack of ambition. He had tried to market himself as a director in New York but eventually realized the market was very competitive, he didn't have the necessary slick, New-York style, and he was a good technician.
So he devoted himself to editing and then cinematography, filming everything from Colt-45 commercials to state visits by foreign dignitaries, including the King of Nepal, who went mountain lion hunting in Nevada. Along the way, he occasionally did shoot/direct, like during his two-month adventure in the South Seas, making a film about vaccinating people in Tonga for the World Health Organization. He also filmed the Queen of Tonga and befriended many people, including a certain Suzy, whose letters I both read and read between the lines.
Vachel was also quite the author. Having studied political as well as library science at Cleveland's Western Reserve University, he wrote some articles after returning from Spain (see Clevelanders Fighting and Dying in Spain), and over 1000 stories about the 98th Bombardment Group of US Army Air Corps (see Life and Death in the Air: A Bombing Run Goes Bad), and dozens of scripts.
Here is some of his pieces about his war experiences and my article on what he did in the Spanish Civil War:
In this story for the 98th Bombardment Group, Vach captures the horror but also all-in-a-day's-work aspects of Captain Taylor's harrowing, roller-coaster attempt to get his B-29 back to base after bombing a bridge in northern Italy.
He wrote this flying in a bomber squadron crossing the Mediterranean to bomb sites in Italy in 1944. As an intelligence officer in a US Army Air, his duties included crawling out over the open bomb bay and filming the bombs as they dropped, writing stories about the airmen for intelligence and publicity purposes, and doing publicity photography.
As the title suggests, this is my article about his experience fighting for a few months in the Spanish Civil War in 1937, witnessing the full brunt of its death and destruction, age 22. Sadly, his fellow "green" American recruits and the Republican Spaniards were up against Franco's well-trained soldiers armed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
This article, co-written with his high school buddy Marty Miller, had the subhead "Local youth, back from the front, gives first-hand account of those battling for the [democratic] Loyalists." It was published by The Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 21, 1937.