Hal Grossman has to think long and hard to get his mind to reverse to a day 60 years ago, when he was a young man with a camera and a dream.
Grossman, 78, was two days shy of his 18th birthday when World War II in Europe ended, on May 8, 1945.
“I knew it was coming,” he said. “I had to. I’d planned to be down there at the right time.”
Grossman grabbed his old Speedgraphic camera, got on the subway in Queens and made it to Times Square in Manhattan.
“There was crowds there,” he said. “Unbelievable crowds. There were lots of photographers from all over the world. They were shooting like mad. I was doing what they were doing. But I was 18 and they were adults."
Grossman was loaded with glass plates, the forerunner of film in his camera. He had some cheap scratchpaper - paper was in short supply because of the war. He used a pencil to jot his notes.
He had to put on reading glasses to see his notes.
He met Stanley Kubrick, who became a big-time Hollywood director. They exchanged cameras. Kubrick took a picture of Grossman, holding Kubrick’s smaller camera, aiming it from a rooftop at the crowd below.
He even jotted down Kubrick’s address in the Bronx - 1414 Shakespeare Ave., and his phone number - erome 8-8666.
All the while he was looking at photos of his crowd shots - sailors blowing big paper horns normally reserved for New Year’s Eve; people standing elbow to elbow, all smiling; guys hugging girls and girls hugging them right back - Grossman complained he couldn’t remember his emotions.
“Can you remember what you did when you were 18?” he asked.
He referred to his notes on the weather: “cloudy and dull.”
An entry right beneath it: “It started to rain at 12 noon.”
He talked of the Times Building - “where the New Year’s Eve ball comes down,” the Paramount Theatre, Astor Hotel, the Bond Booth.
“I shot about 42 pictures,” Grossman said.
Grossman weighs about as much as a loaded saddlebag. He has a gray beard, and his gray hair is tied back. He showed me a picture of him when his hair was black and combed tight - his high school yearbook picture.
The war ended just before he finished high school.
After complaining about not being able to remember yet again, he remembered yet again.
“People were in the mood, a crazy mood,” he said.
Some had come out of bars, still carrying their bottles of beer, drinking wine and champagne and whatever else was available.
“Everybody was drinking. The girls maybe drank a little bit. Everybody was happy. You’ve got to remember that the war was on from ‘39 to ‘45,” he said. “We got in it from ‘41 to ‘45. That’s six years of war. And the war wasn’t over in Japan. People went hog wild. Everybody comes down to Times Square. It was a wild day. All I can tell you is about the emotion. I was jumping all over the place. I got an address from a WAC. She wanted a picture. (He didn’t send her one.) That’s all I can tell you.”
So he told a little about himself.
He was too young to be drafted. So he missed out on the war.
“But I was an air raid warden,” he said.
After high school, he went to Cooper Union School of Art.
“I always wanted to be a Life photographer,” he said.
Instead, he worked in graphic arts for advertising agencies, which is partly what brought him to Denver in 1956 - that and the weather and the location.
“It’s in the middle of a lot of good stuff,” he said.
His love of photography began in his early teens.
“When I made my bar mitzvah, I had a choice of a camera or a bike,” he said. “I picked the camera.”
He got he bike later. He likes to ride, but doesn’t any more.
“I have a dog,” he said. “I walk the dog.”
He likes to go farther than around the block. He has visited 30, maybe 40 countries. Again, he can’t remember.
And he volunteers - at National Jewish Hospital, Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
“You get,” he said. “You’ve got to give back.”
And this he remembers as if it was yesterday: “There was no war like World War II to my generation,” he said.
When Gary Massaro listens, people talk.
massarog@RockyMountainNews.com
or 303-892-5271