They look like a strange animal out of Greek mythology, if you stare at them long enough.
27 April 1937: Lyndon Baines Johnson leaves Austin, Texas for Washington, D.C. after his election to the United States Congress. He bids farewell from the back of a train car to his father, Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr.. The son is positioned above the father, they apparently clasp right hands, each uses their left hand to steady theirselves on the rail car, creating a whirlee-gig, with the bending of the elbows just so, reminescent of the flying feet of the Isle of Man. Each left hand bearing a wedding band. Father wears his brim low and tilts up his head as son leans down at a 45 degree angle, his hat in his steadying left hand to allow the camera man from the Austin Statesman to bullseye on their locked lips. The rest of the photo spins around this, so that if one were to put this image on a turn table, the result would be the endless ying yang progression of the noses of the future President of the United States, and his Daddy.
In the background a woman who can only be described as proud looks on with the slightest of smiles pursed upon her lips.
I first saw this image in college when I was studying for my bachelors degree in Photography, the art, as opposed to the trade. It was in some text somewhere, along with some article I scanned for an explaination. The article spoke to how social custom had changed from what the photograph as document spoke to that change. Perhaps it was not even a photographic text I was reading. So long ago now. I never forgot that image. I looked at it for a long time.
Never saw it again either until it recently dawned on me that I should contact the Johnson Presidential Library. Ever effiecient in their responce, a search was made, and a copy provided to me for a small fee. 8x10 Black and White Glossy, it arrived in the mail and was waiting for me on my desk upon my return from vacation.
Looking at it again for the first time in so many years, yes, it was the image I remembered, like an old friend come back to me, with explainations. What I look at now was not the cropped image in a text, but the full frame photograph, snapped no doubt, with a speed graphic press camera utilizing a flash bulb that erupted with a crackle and was then immediatly jettisoned to smash on the ground and be avoided by pedestrians for awhile as a dangerously hot piece of glass. Etched upon a 4x6 inch negative of panchromatic film with an ASA rating of 125. Rich in detail and gradation of shade.
I think the placement of the pressed lips of the two men was the photographers sole focus, a white point amidst shades of grey and black. The sceen may have been about a father bidding a son farewell, but the image itself is not. It was about two grown men kissing each other, on the mouth, in public, in Austin, Texas, in 1937. It got the phototgraphers attention, it got my attention a half a century later.
It serves too, to document that at that place and time it was an accepted custom, at least between fathers and sons, and their female relatives, to show effection by kissing. This in itself is an amazing and wonderful thing. It is evidence that what came later was not what had always been. The distance between men, reluctence to show emotion, or affection, so note worthy in the post World War II era, was not because that was the way it had always been. Hell no, its right here in black and white. There are religious sects in this country who have long practiced the Apostles kiss, similar to the one Judas is said to have given Jesus at his betrayal. I have long suspected a host of same sex practices like this have been condoned by involking the name of the carpenter.
And what of the act itself, the kiss, the symbolic breath of life, passed from old to young(er) and the closed eyes of at least the elder man, as if this is some dream come true. His boy has become a man, and is going off to congress. LBJ does not so much have his hat off to show off for the camera, he does not want to knock off the hat of his elderly father, and he himself, is already on the train, headed inside where any southern man of his generation would have immediatly removed his hat.
It is sweet to me in that they do resemble some kind of twisted, winged animal, in their pairing. Like together they will take off flying for Washington is some great wirlwind. The Texas farmer, and the man who will one day become one of the most powerful humans in the world. A kiss binds them together.
Image copywrite The Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library: