Portraits

and a short video

Jeez! I did not mean for a whole month to go by without posting! I got very busy carrying books to the post office, which I genuinely love doing because it gives me great joy to be able to share Dad’s book.

This week I was thinking about the end of the book, because it is one of my favorite parts. (Spoiler alert: I am going to describe the end. If you don’t want to know, skip to the photos or the video of Dad at the bottom of this post.)

One of the things Dad did after every trip was take a picture of the men who let him ride with them. He would then make prints and send them back to the crew as a thank-you for their hospitality. These have always been among my favorite pictures, but when we originally put together the photos for the book, not many crew pictures were included. (Dad preferred pictures of trains to pictures of people.) But then one day I found a half-forgotten folder of these thank-you “notes”—most of which I’d never seen before. It was such a beautiful discovery! It allowed us to end the book the way he ended his rides, with a series of thank-you photos to the people who shared their trains with him. Here are some of my favorites. If any of you readers know the names of the people in these photos (we have some of them, but not all), we’d love to hear from you and find out more about them. I can share them in another post!

Meanwhile, here is Mr. Barry last weekend, happily reading his own book. His voice is very soft, so you may not be able to hear everything he said, but here’s the gist: “I know it might seem strange for me to read my own book. Why would I do that when I wrote the thing? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s fun! When I read it, and go back to the beginning, I think, Oh, wow! I forgot about that!”

Thanks so much for reading!