Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2009/01/10

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Subject: [Leica] My mother is gone...
From: pklein at threshinc.com (Peter Klein)
Date: Sat Jan 10 13:42:35 2009
 
LUGgers:  My mother, Emilie Klein, is gone.  She passed away at dawn on 
Thursday morning.  Her younger sister and I were with her throughout the 
final night.

Emilie's years (1921-2009) spanned the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, 
WWII, the 50s, the Age of Aquarius, the Space Age and the digital 
revolution.  She was a courageous woman whose mobility was impaired by 
polio when she was just a year old.  Through most of her life, she could 
walk, but one leg was shorter than the other and she wore lifts on one 
shoe.  The last couple of years, she was mostly in a motorized wheelchair.

Though she never got a college degree, she took courses at the New School 
in New York, was an avid reader, and became a self-taught librarian. She 
created the library at Temple Isaiah in Lexington, Mass. and ran it for 
about 30 years.  She was a "people person" who became friend, confidant and 
surrogate mother to many.

My mother's influence formed the humanities half of my makeup, as my 
father's formed the scientific/technical.  It was her example that sparked 
my interest in photography.  On all our trips and family outings, she would 
carry her Bolsey B2 rangefinder and Gossen Pilot light meter.  She shot 
only Kodachrome. I have a heritage of hundreds of slides, dating from about 
1950. And she was a Leica user--after I got my M2 about 1970, she bought a 
IIIf and brightline viewfinder, which she used until she couldn't see well 
enough to focus.  She didn't know much about photographic technique, but 
she did fine.

Here are the three pictures that will stand with her memorial candle at our 
house this week:

 From 1951-52, with my Dad (Kodachrome, slightly overexposed):
http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/pklein/family/Misc1950s/19EmMilt52.jpg.html

October 2007, my favorite recent picture of her (B&W, of course):
http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/pklein/family/SuzyOct07/L1002138EmBW-w.jpg.html

May 2008, at the Tulip Festival near Mt. Vernon, WA:
http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/pklein/family/tulips08/L1003317-prf.jpg.html

--Peter
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