Quite a lot of mention was made of Daddy's neckwear: "Funky." "Ugly." "I was wearing the ugliest tie I could find, and his was ten times uglier."
I don't think so.
Wild? Often. Busy? Undoubtedly. But after Admiral Farragut Academy, the N.R.O.T.C. and the Navy, nobody was going to rope Burt Keppler into wearing another uniform. He also swore off white shirts, and that he wore them in Japan is a tribute to his respect for Japanese custom, because he never, never, wore a white shirt on American shores again.
The shirt/tie combinations could vibrate sometimes, and Mom tried to intervene, but he got up earlier than she did, so she bears no responsibility for his daywear.
But the ties themselves aren't ugly at all. They're amazing.
Here is the speech I gave at the memorial:
Remembering My Father
I want to thank Hatchette-Filipacci Media for hosting this memorial, and Dad's co-workers at Popular Photography for putting it together, and the New School for providing the space. And thank you all for coming.
Daddy really had two families--- he had us and he had you, his photographic family. It's been wonderful for us reading the nice things you and people around the world have been saying about him. He would keep letters from admirers in a file marked "Keppler's Kudos" which leads me to a favor I want to ask you.
As Burt Keppler's photographic family, you are vessels of Keppler stories and we, his Croton-on-Hudson family, would like to know them.
We want more of his wit: He took great delight in oddities and sudden flights of fancy, such as when he took us children to Haiti and there were rats in the trees. Gigantic rats---you could see their tails hanging down. He said, "All right, the first child to take a rat by the tail, swing him three times over your head and throw him fifteen feet gets a penny!" Then he chortled, because he loved the notion so much, and was so pleased with himself. It was so much fun watching him amuse himself.
In his early days at Modern Photography, he really wrote half the magazine himself, so he would write under pseudonyms like, "Joe Crayon," which came to him in a dream.
That sort of playfulness was underappreciated when he was at Harvard. In Freshman English, he handed in a research paper entitled, "Where Pink Elephants Go When People Aren't Seeing Them." The story is too long to go into here, you can ask me after, but I can tell you it involved a bar on Third Avenue.
The professor had to admit it was a well-written paper, but it came back with a single-word comment: "Facetious."
We want more of his erudition:I remember one Sunday morning long ago we spent the morning talking about isinglass: was it used for windshields in electric cars like the Maxwell, or was it sturgeon bladder? Actually, it's both. The dictionary says, "Don't get them confused." It's hard to see through a sturgeon bladder.
We want more of his kindness: He had friends everywhere, and he helped some of the ones in underdeveloped countries, to the extent that somewhere in India, there is a concern called the Herbert Colour Lab. That's the best tribute I ever heard. Better than an airport.
We want more of his sparkle: You may have seen the Keppler Christmas tree on our cards through the years. This tree was exactingly decorated according to Daddy's Standards for Tree Decoration, which dictated that it be completely and evenly covered, from the trunk out, every twig. He would direct operations while we loaded up the tree until it was a perfect reflection of the enthusiasms of Burt Keppler in ornament form: Dirigibles, Automobiles, Cameras of course, Egyptian ornaments, English ornaments, Japanese ornaments, Fish, Shakespeare, Miss Piggy, the Red Tom ornament, the Green Kathy ornament, the fiddles and bird feeders for my mother--- we never had tinsel, there wasn't room. One year, we hung the last ornament, stepped back, and my mother sighed with contentment. "I don't think anybody has a prettier tree, anywhere," she said.
Daddy said, "Joe Crayon has!" and they both fell down laughing.
Well, we want more of that. That's the favor I want to ask you. We want, we need, to preserve as much of his sparkle, his erudition, his kindness, his Burtishness, as possible. So. If you could send us your memories of him, it would help us. You can send them to me by regular mail, my address is next to the guest book, or you can go to a tribute site I started. It's just a simple blog, since Daddy's technological genius passed me by, but here's the address: burtkeppler.blogspot.com. I really should have called it Keppler's Kudos.
Daddy loved his work. He loved photography, and he loved being with you, his friends and colleagues. It was a great pleasure for him to work with you, and for that I thank you. Hooray for Herbert Keppler.
