“Everybody who was involved on the Newsweek side felt as strongly, I think, as the people of Springfield that something good was happening, and it was going to be a wonderful story. And that’s how it worked out.”
It was, in fact, a Springfielder’s love for the edition and his family’s connection to it that led to the digitally recorded interview of McNamee that’s now part of the Turner Foundation’s oral history archives.
Rod Hatfield, the son of Dick Hatfield, who appeared in the edition, set up the interview after reminiscing with his parents over the edition as he helped them make their annual 20-hour drive to Florida for the winter.
The younger Hatfield was a sophomore at Catholic Central High School in 1982 when McNamee dropped over to their home on Christmas Eve to shoot some photos.
“Somehow, through the grapevine, Newsweek was tipped off that they should talk to (my father) about the 1950s, which is his favorite subjected,” he explained.
“My father is quite a colorful personality,” said a son occasionally given to understatement. “The interview went well, so they deployed Wally to come out to the house.”
At his father’s suggestion, they washed the then high-schooler’s 1970 Chevy Malibu that Christmas Eve, and McNamee’s photos are preserved in a family album.
“In terms of my family’s mythology, that’s lore,” Rod Hatfield said.
During the trip to Florida “we had that conversation (about McNamee’s visit) again,” he added. And while his father was putting in a shift at the wheel, Rod Hatfield pulled out his I-Phone to search for McNamee.
In the process he took his first full measure of the man who was a four-time photographer of the year and was given a lifetime achievement award by the White House Press Photographer’s Association; who covered all the presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush; who shot 11 Olympics, several Super Bowls and multiple war zones; and who covered Mick Jagger’s 50th birthday party in Barbados.
To Hatfield, himself a professional photographer and videographer, McNamee represented something of a Yoda figure, to the point he was nervous about calling him.
Hatfield said that, at 81, McNamee turned out to be “a totally unpretentious guy” who retains a sharp mind and distinct personality.
Although legally blind from the effects of macular degeneration, McNamee said he remains so vital “it’s hard to believe his skin can contain the life energy he possesses.”
Following the afterglow of a 14-hour drive home after the interview, Hatfield edited his digital recordings into two roughly 45-minute clips, one of which focuses on the American Dream edition.
“I was based out of Washington, where I covered a lot of politics and presidency,” McNamee says in that segment. “But I was also doing whatever else I could to get me out of Washington.”
McNamee said the idea of celebrating issues Newsweek had covered for 50 years through the eyes of five Springfield families “was an exciting prospect, because it was about a magazine I loved and it was an important anniversary.”
It had other pluses.
“For six months or more, I was, in effect, my own boss.”
Working in conjunction with the reporters assigned to the Bacon, Nuss, Gram, Cappelli and Bayley families, “I wore out those airplanes from Washington to Dayton,” then stayed in the Best Western because its sliding glass doors made it easy for him to step outside for an end-of-the-day cigar, he said.
He and other Newsweek staffers also made the Elite Cafe their unofficial dinner spot, a place where they all remarked on the extent that Springfielders welcomed them.
"It was astonishing," McNamee said. "There was not a bit of resistance for entree into their lives. Everybody, everybody was on board."
“I don’t know if you can define patriotism (as being) for a city,” McNamee said. “But these people were very happy and proud that their city and family was included in this unique experience of being the subject of a major news story for a magazine.”
At Rod Hatfield’s prompting, McNamee recalled individual pictures from the edition.
• A “totally unposed” picture of a bride relieving her pre-vow anxiety with a drink from a bottle of Jim Beam;
• A twilight photo from the top of a Ferris Wheel at the Clark County Fair that doubled with a couple in closeup against a wider scene.
• A photo of an elderly Dorothy Bacon “down on her knees scrubbing the floor …a lovely woman with great pride and still hard at work late in life.”
• A picture of the Cappelli family posed with poinsettias whose reds, through “the magic of Kodachrome … just sprang off the page.”
Some of McNamee’s favorite moments including flying with Caro Bayley Bosca in an open cockpit Stearman tail-dragger out of the Marysville airport, communicating through the plastic tubing that ran from one leather helmet to the other.
“She looked perfect with that (white) scarf,” he said. “She just looked the part of what she was: a gentle, lady, lovely, an aviator.
“I gather Caro has passed away,” McNamee said, then added some words that appeared a few times in the interview: “and God bless her.”
Ultimately written by Peter Goldman, whom McNamee calls “Newsweek’s most distinguished writer, McNamee said the results bore out the strength of the idea behind the edition.
“I loved our story,” he said. “It was an excellent way of talking about what happened through the years in the most elemental fashion through the experiences of ordinary people.”
His tone, if not words, seem to point to it as a marriage made in heaven.
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