*A poem for my father, Larrie Wanberg, on his birthday (February 28, 1930-May 2, 2021)
Whenever my father came across a hat, he would put it on his head and suggest I take a photograph. His parent’s named him Larrie, with “ie” instead of “y,” making him unique and a lifetime of correcting others on the proper spelling. He was a mischievous boy with a big sense of humor. They called him Larrie boy, an affectionate term they used until he got married. He grew up in an era when men wore hats, a distinctive identifier both functional and fashionable: a rancher, a banker, a pharmacist, a shopkeeper. When entering church where his father was preacher and mother was organist the hats were removed at the door and all Gods children were children again. Larrie boy sat in the front pew with his brother and sisters and would make faces at the parishioners behind him. At four, when his father was sermonizing, he went to the front corner of the church behind the organ where his mother was playing and baptized the slanted floor boards, a rivulet of embarrassment for his parents and a moment of levity for the congregation. In his serious roles as an adult—a doctor, a colonel, a professor, a social planner, a journalist—Larrie boy would disappear inside the professional boxes he built for himself. When he donned a hat, Larrie boy would emerge, a class clown for an instant, a new role taken, a fur trapper, a cowboy, a Viking. How often does a son get to meet his father as a child? The older we both got it was often. A cycle of aging returning the playfulness of a child to the man, a rounding of the corners of his square boxes, his professional roles fading as the finitude of life was looming. Larrie boy’s ancestors looked down at him from the living room wall of the parsonage where he grew up, stoic immigrants building their own boxes in a new land, sitting still for long exposure photographs, smiles unwelcome, movement ruining the moment. A hand-held Brownie camera changed how people were captured. A moment on film lasts longer and is more accessible than the dissertation he wrote or the diplomas he received. The finitude that closed his box for good at 91 has become infinite through numerous, humorous snapshots, a playful legacy that supersedes his serious accomplishments. And for his descendants, a glimpse of the man as he really was.
PHOTOS: Top left, lower left in photo c. 1934; top right, Zion Lutheran Church, Towner, North Dakota; bottom left, Larrie in front pew on a visit back home July 2010; bottom right, Larrie Boy with the folks at the house where he was born, c. 1938.
