Capturing Burbank’s heroes of yesteryear
In a hallway on the second floor of the Belmont Village of Burbank assisted-living facility on Monday, Ed Robinson was decked out in a deep blue beret, emblazoned with gold letters spelling “U.S. Navy” on the band and a blue-and-white scarf stylishly knotted around his neck. And he was singing “Anchors Aweigh” — the Navy’s official song.
Long ago, Robinson served in the sea service testing parachutes during the Korean War — 182 jumps, or “something like that,” including some tests where he sat in an ejection seat, he said, and someone else did all the work.
“I made it out the other side,” he added.
“We were young and dumb, and they gave us $50 more a month,” he said. “That was all the money in the world.”
PHOTOS: Photographer returns to Belmont Village to make WWII veterans portraits
This week, a bit older and perhaps wiser, Robinson was one of more than a dozen veterans at the senior-living center having their photos taken by Tom Sanders, a Bay Area photographer who is traveling to 24 Belmont Village locations this year to photograph the veterans in those communities. The photos will later be hung in galleries at each facility.
Sanders has shot portraits of cowboys, celebrities and even people who pole dance at home, but it’s his second project photographing elderly veterans for Belmont Village. Portraits from a similar project about seven years ago populate galleries at nearly two dozen senior-living centers and are featured in his 2010 book “The Last Good War: The Faces and Voices of World War II.”
He first photographed an elderly veteran as part of an assignment while getting his bachelor’s degree at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. The experience “kind of put my life in perspective,” he said, and helped him understand what his own grandfather, also a veteran, had gone through.
He moved to Redondo Beach, where he lived for a few years and continued photographing veterans in his spare time, he said. Soon, Belmont Village Senior Living discovered his work and commissioned the photography project.
Julie Walke, a spokeswoman for Belmont Village, said that when the galleries of the photos were opened in each community, they became touchstones for the elderly veterans, who began to hold “coffee klatches” and developed new friendships as a result of being featured in the portraits.
On that first tour, Sanders photographed Edith Shain, the uniformed nurse being kissed by an American sailor in the iconic Alfred Eisenstaedt photograph “V-J Day in Times Square” at the end of WWII, and Louis Zamperini, the Olympic athlete and prisoner of war during WWII who was the subject of the recent film “Unbroken” and the book upon which it was based.
Both Shain and Zamperini have since passed away, as have most of the veterans Sanders photographed for that project, he said. Most, but not all.
Sanders photographed Mildred Weed Evans, now 99, during that first project, and she sat for a portrait again this week. Evans served in the Navy WAVES, which stands for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, training men at San Francisco’s Treasure Island to shoot 20-millimeter and 40-millimeter guns.
Alongside her first portrait are her words describing service both as a gunnery specialist and as a legal secretary as life changing. She chose to use the same quote for the latest portrait, which will be unveiled to the community at Belmont Village of Burbank during a celebration on Aug. 31. The event will be open to the public and will feature a military color guard.
To make the portraits look different this time, Sanders said, he’s looking to add depth to the photos in post-production by adding in a background layer featuring historic photos of his subjects or other images that point to their personal histories.
“I love blending art and history together,” Sanders said, adding that he hopes his art “invites a closer look” at the subject’s story.
Robinson said his old photos definitely tell a story.
“I look at some of the photos, and you can see we were having fun,” he said.