Saturday, Oct. 24, 2009

Bestler | A new photo, for the last time

I don't complain much about what the editors do to my column. Generally, of course, they don't do much more than improve it. (OK, there are a few headlines I'd like to discuss, but that's another story.)

I figure, today as yesterday, that it's their candy store and I'm just a guy who stocks the shelves. They want me over there, I go over there. It helps, I guess, that I once helped run the candy store. But that's another story, too.

Anyway, I made one of my few complaints last week when this column ran without a photo of, you know, me.

Personally, I can get along very well without a photo. I know what I look like and most readers, after 20 years of my scribbling, know, too.

But there was another problem. I was playing golf last Saturday at Wedgefield Plantation when I got a call from my 5-year-old grandson. He wanted to know why I wasn't in the paper.

Well, of course he would be concerned. He can't read my name, but he knows what old Pop-Pop looks like. And today there wasn't any Pop-Pop.

I explained that it was no big deal. It looks like they are doing something different and forgot about my picture. Not to worry.

Well, of course I complained, using that little sob story to make my point. And today, Voila!, we have a new photo.

I don't think I could count all the photos that have accompanied my columns since 1989. I do know that most are flattering - and I think most people who meet me agree, though they don't come right out and say it.

"You look, uh, different in person," is the nice way they put it. They don't fool me for a second.

One well-known Grand Strander noted, when he met me, that I was a lot smaller than I looked in the paper. Another asked if I was 12 when my picture was taken. As if.

My favorite comment came when we changed photos several years ago on an Oct. 31. I appeared for the first time wearing a tie with sunglass-adorned smiley faces. A new reporter stopped by to tell me how great it was that I chose to wear a special Halloween tie for that one day.

I had to tell him, no, that was not a special tie. I would be wearing it for the rest of the column's natural-born days.

The current photo cannot be so easily criticized. It was shot by my wife on our porch in McClellanville. I expect this one, finally, will serve for the rest of the column's natural-born days.