THE SOUTHLAND FIRESTORM: A SPECIAL REPORT : EYEWITNESS : CLARON OAKLEY: Businessman : ‘Those Portraits Were Kind of My Company’

Victims of the fires often speak of family photographs, either in grief or with relief that the pictures were saved--a thin thread of history to console lives otherwise shattered. Claron Oakley, a 68-year-old Glendale businessman, had only moments to flee his Kinneloa Canyon home before it was consumed by fire. Awakened by a neighbor, he showered and hastily grabbed a basket full of snapshots. What he left behind continues to haunt him: a hallway filled with about 100 portraits and photos documenting six generations of his family, Mormons who took great pains to trace their roots. He also lost a book of remembrances dedicated to his wife, Julie . *

Over and above everything I lost, my mind goes back to those pictures. When you go to bed and can’t sleep, you kind of resurrect the moment, and “if only” is your vocabulary: If only I had taken 15 minutes to go down the hall and take the ones that were the most irreplaceable.

A young man who is now dead who was kind of a surrogate son for me had made a montage of my career and framed it, with a personal tribute in the middle of it. And oh, that hurt when I saw that was gone.

And then a photographer friend came just before my wife died in 1972 and took pictures of me and her and our three children, that are so revealing of the personalities of each of them. I’d almost say, “Good morning” as I walked past this giant picture of Julie with this marvelous smile that everybody remembers so.

There was one photograph of my maternal grandparents with their children around them, another of my paternal grandparents with their children around them. They were all Mormon pioneers in Utah.

There was another of my grandfather graduating from law school at the University of Michigan in his proud derby and vest and black suit. I had a picture of my wonderful Sara, my daughter, when she was 8. And below it, one of my wife when she was 8. Next to that was a picture of my mother when she was 16. And another of my mother at a slumber party with her 16-year-old girlfriends.

Also among the pictures was the home where I was born in Provo.

When I was bishop, I married some wonderful couples and I had pictures of all of them with me, and those are all gone. So are the wedding pictures of my three children, and the only picture in existence of me and my wife on our wedding day in 1950.

I’m going to visit my children in Provo at Thanksgiving, and I’m going to see if I can duplicate some of those pictures.

I’ve lived in that house 35 years and we had evacuated three times before. It was almost that same day in October, 1970, when we had the last fire evacuation. I came racing home. They all came out the door to get in the station wagon, and the children all had their jack-o-lanterns, and Julie had a bottle of perfume. That was all they could think of in our panic.

I didn’t have a ho-hum attitude when I went out this time, but I couldn’t find my car keys. As I kept running from room to room looking for my car keys, my mind shifted from saving anything to just getting out of there, and I just grabbed one little basket of snapshots from the coffee table.

I know it’s dumb, but I thought to myself: I’d never get the framed portraits back to where they were on the wall (if I took them down). It wasn’t a ho-hum attitude, but I just knew I’d be back again. The next time I saw the house, it was a pile of rubble.

Those portraits were kind of my company. As I’d walk down the hall to shower in the other bathroom, I could just look over, and they were all there. Now, neither they nor the house are there.