Thursday, February 8, 2007 Older Editions

'His pictures live on...'

By Brian Messenger

Armed with leftover film, photographer Richard Graber would emerge from his downtown Andover workshop during the 1960s and capture whatever caught the interest of his keen eye.

His images of Andover people and the places now stand as historical documentation, showing what Andover looked like physically and how its citizens lived their daily lives.

"It started out, when he had a few shots left, he'd go outside the studio and start taking pictures," said Howard Yezerski, who owned a downtown art gallery between 1968 and 1988. "He didn't start out saying, 'I'm going to chronicle the town.'"

Graber, who moved to Andover in 1962 from his birthplace of Goshen, Ind., with his wife Rachel, died last week at the age of 72 after a long bout with Parkinson's disease. His black-and-white photos of the town span the final four decades of the 20th Century.

"There aren't that many chroniclists, and he certainly was a major one," said Andover artist David Sullivan, a college friend of Yezerski and initial partner with the gallery in the late 1960s. "Without that kind of documentation, which people do on their own, all traces go and you just have no idea what it was like."

Like many American communities in the decades after World War II, Andover was still a small, relatively rural and conservative town when Graber first packed his bags and moved east. But as the 1960s wore on, and many of the social and political issues of the time began to heat up, an attitude of change became more and more palpable - both on the national scene and on the streets of Andover.

"He welcomed it. He was just like a surfer riding that wave. He flourished," said Dana Wilson, owner of Raspberries on Elm Street. "He became a chronicler of the whole Andover scene."

"It seemed like a much smaller place then," said Sullivan. "Now you have a sense of not knowing anyone. And Dick Graber would be a person that everyone knew."

Once the '60s had ended and Andover's downtown began to evolve into its modern state, Graber was there to capture it, change by change. He kept his unorthodox, German-issued, double-lens camera by his side well into the 1990s.

"Not until the end of the century [did he stop] - the only thing that stopped him was Parkinson's," said Wilson, of Graber's career. "It was more of a physical disability than anything else."

For many longtime Andover residents, a bygone era is as much associated with Graber and his vast body of work as it is with soda fountains, 10-cent ice cream cones and downtown biker bars.

"Twenty to 25 years later, when you look at these pictures, there's a kind of nostalgic quality that touches people emotionally," said Yezerski. "His pictures live on."

Soon after his arrival in Andover, Graber began renting out a 250-square foot space within the Musgrove Building, which he used as a photo workshop for the next eight years. Originally built in 1895 and at different times the site of Andover's post office, a telephone company and an auto dealership, "by the sixties the Musgrove had fallen into a sad state of disrepair," wrote Graber in his book Elm Square.

The book was published in 1996 by the Andover Gallery in conjunction with the town's 350th anniversary.

While the nearby Ford's Coffee Shop was the center of activity downtown during the day, with businessmen gathering for lunch and Punchard High students hanging out after school, the junior high students preferred to stake out DeQuattro's Restaurant, which was also within the Musgrove Building.

The Andover Spa was the place for after hours socializing, where current events, like the Vietnam War, were often discussed passionately.

In his book, Graber recalls nearly getting punched by a local judge at the Spa after he openly criticized President Lyndon Johnson's handling of the war. In another incident, a volunteer behind the counter, also a veterans agent, "was convinced that I was to blame for the anti-war sentiment among Andover's youth," wrote Graber.

"The country was in turmoil," said Wilson, who met Graber at the age of 14, in 1965. "He was a lighting rod. He drew the intelligentsia and the artists of Andover."

In a word, Sullivan described Graber's downtown photography as "gritty."

"It's strange to think of Andover as gritty," he said. "If you took a lineage you'd definitely see a cleaning up."

One of Sullivan's favorite Graber photos is of a group of young motorcyclists hanging out in Elm Square during the 1960s.

"There's one of a bunch of 20-year-olds hanging around outside with some bikes," said Sullivan. "I don't think I've heard a bike in town in ages."

There were three Elm Square bars in the 1960s. Two of them - Walter's, which eventually burnt down, and the Central Cafe, with a Pabst Blue Ribbon sign on the outside and unpainted plywood decor on the inside - were on Post Office Avenue.

One of eight ground-floor businesses in the Musgrove Building, the Town Grill was "the third bar in the square, and by far the classiest," wrote Graber in his book.

In another photograph dated in the '60s, the Town Grill's softball team, a beer-swigging group of Korean War veterans, according to Wilson, posed in uniform for Graber in a team photo.

"They looked upon Richard Graber as being a freak," said Wilson. "But they posed for him. He had that ability."

Though documentary photography may be what Graber is best remembered for, he was also the house photographer at Phillips Academy throughout the 1970s and 1980s and took many family and wedding portraits.

"Richard was an artist in his own right," said Wilson. "He was a little offbeat. He was different."