How in Saving Photographs We Save Something of Ourselves

I keep a couple of dead men in my house--their memories, at least, in their images.

Of these men I know little. One is named Corwin Wickersham. I bought the paper trail of his life, photographs and documents, for the cost of the glass and frames in a Glendale thrift store. From these I know that he joined the Army as an artilleryman in 1917, that in the next war he was a dollar-a-year man for FDR, that he was awarded the Croix de Guerre by Charles de Gaulle, and that after the war’s end he and his wife made the trek up Mt. Kilauea in Hawaii.

The other, who smiles handsomely at me from atop my television, is an enlisted man named Jim. This I know only because that is how he signed the picture of himself in uniform, “To you darling with all my love, Jim.”

Beyond those fragments, nothing. They are orphaned paper men, unmoored from time and place, and especially from family.

Theirs was a time when photographs were precious, not so rare as in the 19th century, when the only photo image of a loved one may have been taken on the deathbed, but hardly as plentiful as now, when Polaroid can produce an image in an instant and corner photo booths can run off a dozen copies in two hours, and every one of life’s moments, ultrasound to elderliness, is a video moment.

In saving the Pvt. Jims and the Col. Wickershams, we preserve something of ourselves.

for as long as paula johnson could remember, he was part of the family, not sitting there eating drumsticks at Thanksgiving, of course, but in a dozen black-and-white photographs, as real as the aunts and uncles and cousins.

His name was Herbie. Herbie Klave. If it had been John Smith, none of this might have happened. The name was funny in a sweet way; so was her mom, Mary, whenever Paula asked about him, why so many pictures of him--tall and fair and good-looking--were there in the box with the family snapshots. Her mom would go all shy and smile and say, well, they all used to run around together, the crowd at the ice cream shop where she worked in Bay City, Mich.

So every time the box was opened to receive school photos or Christmas snapshots, there he was, Herbie and his pal in Navy whites . . . Herbie poking his head out the window of some big old balloon-bumper sedan . . . Herbie leaning against a wall, hands in the pockets of his khakis.

Mary Stanchak Johnson died in 1991, and it was a long time before her younger daughter got around to hauling the photo boxes to her Pasadena duplex, but her mania for tidiness finally got the better of her, and one day she emptied them all on the dining room table.

This pile went to one set of cousins, these baby snaps to another part of the family, and so on, until there was only Herbie. “I kept putting them off to one side of the table, thinking, ‘Herbie, Herbie, what am I gonna do with you, Herbie?’ ”

And then she switched on her computer and went on the Internet to “People Finder,” and, well, how many Klaves can there be? There were nine in Michigan, and Paula wrote to them all, then widened her search to America, and there he was, in Indianapolis, Herbert E. Klave, and her stomach started hopscotching and the hair on her arms stood at attention.

Paula sent the letter, and within three days Mrs. Klave called. “I thought, ‘Oh, God, he’s dead and his wife’s calling,’ ” but Herbie was fine, and what’s more, they were celebrating their 49th wedding anniversary.

Herbie and Mary were never “too serious,” she added, and Paula told about ragging her mother that if she’d married Herbie, Paula would be tall and blond instead of 5-foot-2 and dark.

Then came the amazing part. Mrs. Klave said something to the effect that “your mother was really pretty,” and Paula realized: Herbie Klave had saved photos of Paula’s mother, as Paula’s mother had saved his.

People had teased Mrs. Klave about having pictures of her husband’s old girl, but he had such fond memories, and so there they stayed. Until she packed all five of them up and sent them to Paula.

“You don’t think about your own mother being funny or flirtatious,” Paula says, but it was Mary Stanchak all right. There was one of Mary and her cousin Esther and a boy. “His name’s Jim. He showed us around a little bit. Terrible driver,” read the back of the photo. In the last shot, only the top half is discernible; the bottom, below Mary’s waist, is a white, overexposed blur. “They cut off my legs,” she wrote on the back to Herbie, “but you’re not missing anything.”

Herbie never did come to the phone. Maybe it was a guy thing, maybe it was too many memories from too long ago. From her duplex in Pasadena, Paula has something to thank the Internet for. Without it, “I would have taken that baggie of photos to my grave.”

Now she is organizing again. Her pen pal in Green Bay, Wis.--real letters, not e-mail--is 86. She photocopies his letters and hers, so when the time comes his five children will have a complete set to keep, and she will, in some way, become someone else’s Herbie, someone to keep, to remember, to wonder over.

Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com