MY PAPA'S NATIONAL GEOGRAPHICS

“.Even before I understood the concept of issues, I knew he had a copy of the very first one….”

My grandfather, Papa, was a Renaissance man, although as a child I wouldn’t have known to call him that. To me, he was the most famous person in the small town where he and my grandmother lived. He was the postmaster, and everyone knew him, and when we sent him mail we addressed it simply: 
Papa
Pleasant Hill, Missouri

He was an avid photographer who not only took countless photos of my siblings and me, but on most visits to our house would bring his movie camera and a set of lights to film us. The lights hurt our eyes and made us squint, but we loved seeing the finished movies at Papa and Grandma’s. Out of concern for their wall-to-wall carpet, Papa made us sit on pieces of cardboard to watch; he liked to reverse the film, and when we spat out birthday cake or flew out of the pool and back up to the diving board, we’d laugh so hard that one of us usually wet our pants.

Photography was not just Papa’s hobby, but a part-time job as well. When he was younger, he developed film for the drugstore, and folks in town hired him to take family photos. Through word of mouth, another hobby, bookbinding, also eventually became a source of income, as people from all over Missouri started coming to Papa and Grandma’s bearing carefully wrapped family Bibles for him to repair. Bibles to repair, and magazines to bind into books. By that point he’d been binding magazines into books for years. But not just any magazines. Only National Geographic.

Papa left school after eighth grade and never traveled farther than Colorado, but he loved exploring the world through National Geographic. And of course the photographer in him was drawn to the magazine’s amazing images. A stack of National Geographics was always on the table next to his chair, and even before I understood the concept of issues, I knew he had a copy of the very first one, Vol. I, No. 1, from 1888, 11 years before he was born. In fact, he had every issue, and the corner of the house where he kept them—all hand-bound—eventually sank a bit from the weight.

Every year, he gave my family a subscription to the yellow-bordered magazine you couldn’t buy in a store. He’d put the envelope on our Christmas tree, the only present not wrapped and tied with ribbon, the only present that would last all year without our tiring of it.

I inherited three things from Papa: his love of onions (he’d eat quarters of red onion like he was eating an apple, and I do too), an interest in faraway places and the people who live there, and this two-volume set of National Geographics from 1955, the year I was born, which my father gave me after Papa died. Painstakingly bound by my grandfather, their spines lettered in his hand, the books have always been the mainstay of my personal library.

Papa wasn’t overtly affectionate, but when he told me he was proud of me or gave me a wink or a smile, I felt his love as hard and generous as one of Grandma’s strong hugs. It was just quieter. He was just quieter. I got my degree in cultural anthropology two years after he died. I have to think all the years of thumbing through the magazines with the yellow covers played a part. And I like to think he would have been proud. —Laurie Sunderland

Papa took this picture of my father in the early 1930s; the books behind him are National Geographics he bound. As the story goes, he sent the photo to the magazine and they published it—in 1933, my dad thinks, though I don’t know for sure and have never seen it in print. After Papa died, most of his bound books and magazines were auctioned off. It took two large hay trailers to cart them away.

I’m guessing Papa set up this shot to look candid and had Grandma push the button.

Grandma and Papa’s church-directory photo, circa 1974. That was the year of their fiftieth wedding anniversary, for which Grandma made this dress. (Papa wasn’t the only talented person in that house.)

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Laurie Sunderland lives in Boulder, Colorado, and blogs about hiking, traveling and her family at lauriesunderland.com.

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