Jerry Tisserand - My Father When Young : Photographs by Jerry Tisserand

INTRODUCTION

I would rather take photos of the different things, the ones that no one else has taken. Perhaps it is the original in me coming out.

Jerry Tisserand, April 24, 1955

I didnt know my dad was a photographer.

I discovered this because of COVID. In 2008, my dad died following a heart attack. After the funeral, I rented a truck and packed it with his furniture, his metal Army trunk, and dozens of taped-up boxes, and I drove it all to my home in New Orleans. I stashed everything in closets and under beds and pretty much out of my mind.

This past year, with the pandemic keeping me close to home, I finally started opening the boxes. Many of the items I found seemed silenced, their stories long lost: A disassembled cuckoo clock. Prayer cards for family members once mourned but now unknown. Two leather-bound ledgers from a general store in Braggadocio, Missouri, covering 1890 through 1892.

Then, at the bottom of one box, I found two grey steel cases. Inside were neat rows of Kodachrome slides, most of them unmarked. I pulled a few at random and held them, one at a time, to the light. Then a few more.

At first, I didnt understand what I was seeing. Here was the work of a photographer with a curious eye and a unique perspective.

Then I realized the photos had been taken by someone I never knewmy father when young.

Joseph Jerome Jerry Tisserand was born in 1931 in Evansville, Indiana. Our ancestors, like many families in this growing city across the Ohio River from Kentucky, had worked in stone cutting and farming. When Jerry was two years old, the Great Depression reached its nadir in the United States. My grandfather, Joseph Eugene Tisserand, provided for his wife and two children with a job at the Southern Indiana Gas and Electric Company.

Growing up, my dad read Horatio Algers rags-to-riches novels like they were blueprints, and he set out to become a salesman. As a kid, he operated a string of popcorn and cotton-candy machines in Evansville. (Other items I found in his boxes this year included a stack of circa-1940s red-and-white paper popcorn bags.) He decided to attend college and enlisted in the National Guard to pay for it.

Then, shortly before my dads twentieth birthday, his mother, Cecelia Lensing Tisserand, died from cancer.

I always knew my grandmother had died young, but I had never fully considered the cloud of grief that settled over that household of three. This past year, I called up my dads sister, Rosemary Geiss my Aunt Rosie and asked her about that time. Aunt Rosie was spending her own difficult year in and out of quarantine in an assisted living facility. Yet her mind was as sharp and her heart as full as I remember from my childhood.

My mother loved your dad. She really loved him, Aunt Rosie told me. When she died, it hit him hard. I think my father tried to suffer in silence, butJerry couldnt.

Four years later, Dad was heading to France with the Army. My grandfather, who died in 1985, had kept my dads letters from France in a bundle tied in string. After my grandfather died, my dad kept them. This year, I untied the bundle.