In their years of working together, it was always Pat who worried about the
pictures.
For nearly 20 years, Barb Cramer and Pat Slattery have worked together producing
television stories. At WSMV-TV, Cramer was a reporter and worked with Slattery
on special projects. Today Cramer and Slattery are colleagues working in video
production at Vanderbilt, in much the same capacities.
But on May 5, it was Cramer who took charge of the Slattery family’s photos, saving them from disaster.
When Cramer heard the Slattery family home in Bellevue was flooded on May 2, she
decided to do what she could to help. Pat, his wife Carmel, and their
15-year-old son, Danny, lost almost all of their belongings.
“I was overwhelmed that day and just figured there was no hope for anything,” said Carmel, Pat’s wife of 29 years.
Water rose four feet in the single-story home. The Slatterys say the next week
was a blur of strangers and friends coming in and out of the home they had
owned for 22 years, dragging out river-soaked couches, beds and belongings.
Cabinets of laminated wood were in pieces; the books they contained swelled and
burst out of their shelves.
Then there were the photos.
The family’s three photo albums were a total wreck, and hundreds of other loose photos had
been waiting, semi-organized, to be put into albums “one of these days,” Carmel says. They were kept in a plastic container.
“But the container was on the floor,” she said with a wry laugh. “It filled right up.”
In the back-breaking work of hauling what used to be their homey surroundings
into the street on Beech Bend Drive, the Slatterys say they had become blind to
what was of value, or what might be saved.
“At that moment it’s all just stuff,” Pat said. “You just can’t think about what you should try to save, there’s just too much.”
Cramer had come to help clear out
the house before moisture and mold destroyed the infrastructure, but then she
spotted a small photo of newborn Danny in his mother’s arms at the hospital.
“I saw that picture, and everything was headed for the heap and I thought ‘No, we have to save those.’”
She stashed a bag full of photos in her van, headed home, and got on the
Internet to research what could be done.
“They were all stuck together, most of them face-to-face. It was disheartening,” she said. But the instructions she found were hopefully simple. Lay out photos
that are not stuck together, freeze any batches that can’t be worked on right away, soak the stuck-together ones in cool, clear water.
“It was amazing. Once they really got soaked, they peeled apart nicely. Then they
could be laid out to dry,” Cramer said. “I thought I’d be able to save a few, maybe a handful, but I was able to save most of them.”
A couple of weeks after the water subsided, Cramer visited the Slattery family
at the home of co-worker and friend Emily Pearce, where the family is
temporarily living.
Cramer presented the couple with two full bins of photos, all dry and safe:
photos of the young Slattery couple; the birth of their only son; Pat’s trip to Athens, Greece; the family cat that outweighed baby Danny on the day
he came home from the hospital.
That evening, the Slatterys reminisced with their friend, spinning tales
illustrated by the images that had been lost, then resurrected. Perhaps the
most meaningful story Barb and Pat had ever worked on together, the story of
the Slattery family life.
