Charles Custer, a retired Chicago lawyer whose startlingly detailed photographs of Route 66 businesses that he and his wife Irene took in the early 1950s were recently re-discovered, died at age 91 in January.
The Chicago Sun-Times described Custer’s remarkable life and photographic legacy in an obituary last week. A memorial service had been planned but has been delayed indefinitely by the coronavirus pandemic.
Charles and Irene began taking photographs with an Agfa box camera starting in 1950 during their honeymoon out west and subsequent trips for several years afterward. They’d walk into a business, charm the owners, snap the picture, then sell them the print they’d develop in their motel room’s sink.
Many of the photographs have been identified as taken in Oklahoma and New Mexico. Others were likely to have been shot in Texas and Arizona.
Many years later, Oscar Larrauri Elias and Khela de Freslon of OK More Photography in Cozumel, Mexico, were visiting a son of the Custers’ and saw a box of his parents’ negatives.
Elías and de Freslon washed and digitally scanned about 150 of those negatives, which produced images so clear and detailed, you can easily spot brand names of products in the background and even the types of linoleum on the floor.
The Sun-Times reached out to two notable Route 66 figures to get their opinions about the images:
After studying the images, Michael Wallis, author of “The Mother Road: Route 66,” said he and his wife, the writer Suzanne Fitzgerald Wallis, felt “seduced.”
“It’s just marvelous,” said Wallis, who is based in Tulsa, Oklahoma and likens the Custers’ photos to those of Depression-era greats. “Some of these pictures are evocative to us of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, portraits of the common folk, if you will. They’re a shorthand of notes from the past.” […]
“You immediately feel you know these people,” said Ken Busby, chief executive officer of the Route 66 Alliance in Tulsa. […]
Wallis — whose Route 66 expertise was tapped for the making of the “Cars” movies and who ended up voicing the franchise’s Sheriff of Radiator Springs — said the Custer photos show what’s most special about one of the world’s most famous highways.
“The best thing about the road,” Wallis said, “are the people — the people of the road who managed to eke out a living on the shoulders of the way.”
OK More Photography has posted all of the nearly 150 images on its website, hoping viewers can identify the people and places shown there. Each photograph is numbered so viewers can more easily provide information.
OK More eventually plans to make a road trip to see whether they can trace the Custers’ path.
(A screen-captured sample of Charles Custer images OK More Photography website)
Astonishing photos.