The Forgotten Man

My father’s birthday is coming up in the next few days, and so I have been thinking about him a lot lately. One of the things I’ve been meaning to do is photograph everything I still have from him, and create a kind of catalog of evidence. Somehow I never get around to it, and periodically forget about it altogether. This seems like as good a time as any to actually start exploring the project.

One of the remarkable things about my father was his outsider art. He made pictures, sort of mosaics, out of cut up postage stamps. This is a part of one of his pieces devoted to FDR. He was also an FDR democrat. To the very end. Content-wise it’s quite unsophisticated, but what do you want from an uneducated Greek immigrant who survived the depression working menial food service jobs in NYC?

I still miss him after 16 years,  but I’m glad that he is not around to see the current political climate in which Republicans are actively aiming to dismantle Social Security.