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Jim Wise, Staff Writer
In 1941, when Duncan Heron was 15, he wanted a "good camera" for
his birthday. His mother bought him one, a $15 Argus A2F with variable
focus, adjustable settings and -- remarkable at the time -- a built-in
exposure meter.
The young Heron had a particular reason for wanting a good camera. When
movie star Dorothy Lamour stopped through his hometown of Jackson, Miss.,
he took her picture. Taken with a basic box camera, it didn't come out
very well. Heron figured it was time to move up in the world of photography.
Sixty-some years and 30,000 or so photographs later, his photography has
a showcase all its own: the 2006 the Eno River Calendar. The just-published
35th edition is dedicated to him and illustrated with 58 of his pictures,
plus three of Heron himself taken by Bruce Corliss.
"
I was flattered, of course," Heron, 79, said one morning last week,
in the kitchen of his sylvan home at Durham County's western edge. "It
really is a team effort."
Heron shot photos for his hometown newspaper and high school and college
yearbooks. A retired geology professor at Duke University, he also took
pictures to illustrate class lectures. About 35 years ago, he began photographing
the Eno.
"
He's got a treasure trove of photos that go back to about 1970," said
calendar editor Don Moffitt. He, Heron and designer David Glenn picked
a selection of shots from 1972 through 2004.
"
We thought the combination would make a really beautiful calendar," Moffitt
said. "We know how much time he spends on the river, and we know for
him it's a love affair."
The calendar cover shows the river strewn with fallen leaves and sunlight
streaming through woods along its banks. Heron couldn't remember what year
he shot it, but said the spot in the picture was donated to Eno River State
Park by Don Cox, the Eno River Association's first president.
February has a shot of hikers being forded across the river by pickup truck
at Few's Ford, long before that much-visited site got its present swinging
bridge. May has a picture of a youngster fishing, though the bank around
him is covered with snow. June has a raccoon, standing warily beside a
tree trunk.
July's feature shot is of dancers in the meadow at West Point on the Eno,
during a long-ago Festival for the Eno, with late-afternoon sunlight making
a glow in the trees beyond. "I always liked that picture," Heron
said, but the page also has an inset shot of his granddaughter Bretani
and one of his wife, veteran Durham County Commissioner Becky Heron, singing
with several other local officials.
"
Politicians with their mouths open," he said.
Becky Heron's picture appears in three places in the calendar.
"
Not on my account," he said.
Eno devotion grows
Looking at August's shots of the West Point mill before its collapse and
after its restoration, Heron set a historical record straight. The conventional
story goes that the 18th century gristmill was destroyed by a 1973 flood.
"
The river was not in flood," Heron said, but it was a night of high
winds. One corner of the old mill was supported by a single, unsecured
wooden post. At some point, the wind lifted the mill just enough that the
post fell free. Without it, the mill came crashing down.
September has photos of the O'Brient cabin in the Eno River State Park,
including one of longtime Durham legislator George Miller speaking there. "A
good friend of the Eno," Heron said.
He added that the association hopes the photos of the cabin will inspire
some agency to repair its porch, which was crushed by a falling tree.
November is a montage of Eno preservation notables -- Don Cox, the late
George Pyne, Marion Sands and the Nygards: Holger, Kirsten and Margaret.
Margaret Nygard was the moving spirit behind the river's conservation.
She died in November 1995 as she prepared for the Eno River Association's
annual meeting.
"
That woman was a bulldog," Heron said. "A real polite bulldog,
but a bulldog."
Heron's interest in the river came from a chance encounter with Nygard
in 1969.
"
I didn't know too much about the Eno in those days except it was a place
we wanted to put in the canoe," he said. Paddling downstream, Heron
and fellow geologist Henry Johnson took out at the old, now overgrown,
Cole Mill Road. Nygard, whose home overlooked the river there, came down
to offer the travelers a drink.
"
I remember Margaret was a little upset," Heron said. He had had two
wildflower photos published in a Durham newspaper, and Nygard complained
that they hadn't been identified as growing in the Eno valley.
By that point, Nygard was four years into a campaign to save the river
from abuses, particularly the city's plan to dam it for a new reservoir.
In short order, she had Heron enlisted for the cause, and he enlisted his
photographic talent.
"
The whole point of the photography was to promote the Eno as something
that had to be saved," he said. In 1971, inspired by a high-tech slide
program he saw at a geologists' conference, Heron produced "The Eno
Experience" -- a 23-minute automated show with dual projectors that
dissolved one image into the next, and "a fancy sound system" to
play such fitting music as Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" ("They
paved paradise and put up a parking lot") and the Beatles' "Let
It Be."
"
It was a good 23 minutes," Heron said. "Maybe 8,000 people saw
it. If I had to do it over again, I'd cut it to 15 minutes."
Brushes with fame
Born in 1926, Heron graduated high school during World War II and entered
the Navy's pre-flight program at Millsaps College in Jackson. ("Took
me a nickel to get on the bus and report for duty.")
During his time at Millsaps, he attained one of his claims to photographic
fame: taking a picture of fellow preflight student and TV host-to-be Johnny
Carson pulling a rabbit out of a hat.
"
He never acknowledged he was at Millsaps," Heron said.
While Heron was there, Vicksburg, Miss., decided it would celebrate the
Fourth of July. Since Vicksburg fell to the Union army on July 4, 1863,
during the Civil War, the date had never been cause for celebration before.
But with wartime patriotism running high, the town changed its mind. The
Memphis Commercial Appeal wanted a photographer to cover the occasion and,
knowing about Heron's work for the Jackson paper, tried to get in touch.
Heron missed his chance at history. When the Memphis paper called, he was
AWOL at the movies. "My claim to disfame," he said.
That would not be Heron's only missed opportunity. The first-ever Eno calendar,
for 1971, carried a quote on environmental protection by then-President
Richard Nixon, who had created the Environmental Protection Agency. Heron,
knowing he was going to be in Washington, sent a calendar to the White
House with a note saying he'd like to make an official presentation. (Nixon's
younger brother Ed was one of Heron's students at Duke.)
Hearing nothing, he went on to Washington and was out at dinner when a
waiter came up to say the White House was on the phone. "How they
found me is beyond belief," he said. The White House told him Nixon
couldn't do the ceremony, but another official could. "I said, 'Never
mind.' That was stupid," he said.
Full of photos
In his early Eno years, Heron shot every picture twice: once in color for
slide shows, and again in black-and-white for calendar use. Up to this
year, he said, he had had "about 93" photos in the calendars.
Kodachrome was his standard color film for years, until he switched to
color negatives in the early '90s and then, in 1995, went digital.
"
I'm now on my fifth-generation digital camera," he said, and has about
1.25 gigabytes of photos stored on hard drives at the office he still goes
into every day. He's editor of a professional journal and secretary-treasurer
of a professional society, and he maintains several Web sites.
"
That keeps me kind of busy from time to time," he said.
Heron said he doesn't take as many pictures as he used to. Those he has
made -- except for a batch of high-school negatives he threw out -- are
filed, numbered and catalogued. That, he said, is one reason the Eno River
Association has used so many of his photos.
" I could find mine. If they asked for a picture on a particular subject,
I knew where to lay my hands on it."
Modesty aside, Heron's fans think the 2006 Eno calendar is recognition
due.
"
It looks wonderful," said David Southern, historian of the Durham-Orange
county region and an authority on its flora and fauna. "I thought
it was highly appropriate. Essentially, they were honoring someone who
needed to be honored."
His wife agrees.
"
I'm really thrilled they wanted to have this as the subject of an Eno calendar.
... It's a tribute to him and the time he has volunteered," Becky
Heron said.
" I'm just glad to see this collection of the pictures and the stories that
go along with the pictures. He's been at this for a while."
Staff writer Jim Wise can be reached at 956-2408 or jim.wise@newsobserver.com.