My Father, a Golden Voice

My father was always encouraging me to join him in some adventure he had stirred up, more as a creative partner than a father-son activity. I now think what he really wanted was a genetic part of himself in a younger body to do things his aging body could no longer do. He would live vicariously through my creative pursuits as a photographer, and later, as a filmmaker. He did have a long interest in photography shooting rodeos in his youth for extra money and as a storyteller majoring in English. Once he pursued Social Work in graduate school he lost touch with the visual arts but he always wrote stories.

He once took me on a buffalo hunt on the Ft. Berthold Reservation in North Dakota, home of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara affiliated tribes to celebrate the visit of a descendant of Maximillian of Wied, an amateur anthropologist and Prince from Germany who visited the tribes in 1834. My dad smiled at me from the front cab of a rusted Rez pick up truck, secured by his seat belt as I bounced around the open bed as we drove across the large fenced-in section of prairie, one hand on the rail of the bed and one protecting two cameras from colliding as they swung from my neck. I made a knowing nod to the man sitting next to me, a journalist from the Grand Forks Tribune documenting the story as a Sunday feature, as if this was an ordinary occurrence for me.

My father seemed split in two, his intellectual side, his PhD self, dressed in cheap penny loafers, slacks and a dress shirt sitting in the cab, and me, in my jeans, photographer’s vest and Danner boots I found at a garage sale, perfectly worn in and a perfect fit, in danger of being bounced out of the truck and trampled by a herd of buffalo. My dad inhabited both personas but his aging body could only live in one.

The visitor, laying on his belly to steady his rifle, got his shot. A tribal member field-dressed the buffalo and an impromtu Pow Wow was held the next evening in the high school gymnasium with plenty of bar-b-qued bison for the whole town.

My father signed up for a 3 day digital storytelling workshop held in Berkeley, California. He liked the idea of using still photos and narration to make and share stories, especially stories that create community and empathy between people. At the last minute his schedule changed and he couldn’t attend. He offered his seat to me and it changed the way I worked and the direction of my career. I often think it was a planned intervention to unblock my creative nature: I was stuck as a professional photographer searching for a more meaningful path as a visual artist.

I would often include him on projects I was working on, or I should say he included me. I worked with him on doing a voice over for one video about the aftermath of a tornado in a small town in North Dakota. He volunteered to help clean up the Museum that was partially destroyed and reassemble all the collected artifacts of the Norwegian immigrants that settled the area, including thousands of archival photographs that blew through town and settled on lawns and gutters and car windows.

He wrote an essay but felt a video narrated by him accompanied by still photos would be better. To record his voice over I hung blankets around the bathroom and stuffed pillows into the bathtub and sink to dampen any reverb and placed a mic on a stand in the middle of the room. It was an intimate little cave where the importance of words captured by the microphone loomed large in the moment of recording, like chiseling words from marble that will last forever. For someone recording voice over from a script for the first time it can be very intimidating — a twist of the tongue, a flub of a word, a change in the speed of speech — can set a person back in their confidence and make it seem like a 300 word script might as well be 3,000.

My dad took a while to warm up. At times he mispronounced words so much we giggled like school boys. He had childhood memories of being teased as “marble mouth Larrie” when he mangled words in school. I coached him to slow down in places, where to highlight a word, and how to end a sentence so the audience will know it. In some parts he just couldn’t get through a small paragraph so I had him read one sentence at a time, at least 3 times in a row with a breath in between, without looking at the words to sound more natural. When I felt we were close I removed the CF card from the recording device and loaded it to my computer. I quickly assembled the best sentence from each part into a continuous story and put it to a pre-selected music track. After listening, my dad was elated, like a first grader hearing his voice amplified for the first time, no marbles. Going from an hour of recording time to a 4 minute edit seemed like magic to him. I suggested he sounded a little like Garrison Keillor, who he worshiped from his show A Prairie Home Companion, but we might try recording one more time to make sure we got it just right. He bounded into our makeshift sound studio and stood in front of the mic ready to record again, this time with a confidence and timber to his voice like the master himself.

My dad died 3 years ago at 91 years old. When he became a “filmmaker” late in life, I felt stretched thin at times when his need for my professional services to tell his stories interfered with my own work. But when I hear his recordings now I’m comforted by the sound of his voice and so grateful we could spend so much time together working on creative projects that meant a lot to both of us.

Happy Father’s Day, dad. I miss you.

Watch a 4 minute video to hear my dad’s golden voice…