Associate Editor David Lassen walked into my office in October and said he was talking with Editor Jim Wrinn and suggested we do an all John Gruber gallery. I couldn’t have agreed more. So I held what I had planned for the February 2019 issue and quickly dove into indexes and bound volumes to immerse myself in nearly 60 years of a very prolific photographer. How do you choose only a handful of photos to honor this man who seemed to only know how to capture great imagery?
Gruber, founder of the Center of Railroad Photography & Art, photographer, author, and more, died Oct. 9, 2018. As I began to pull my bound volumes off my book shelves, I seemingly had nearly as many on my desk as I had left on the shelves. I used post-its to mark pages within the same volumes that John had left his mark. I wished it wasn’t his passing that made me take in his work for Trains in this fashion. I’d worked as his editor for a couple of the stories and had certainly seen these photos here and there over the years, but I was moved to see stacks of John’s words and pictures overlap one another on my desk.
I pushed back in my chair and sat there for a moment, taking in the work as a whole. I decided I needed to take a picture. I moved my chair (on wheels) out of the way and grabbed one of my guest chairs, indeed a guest chair that John himself had perched upon. I stood on the chair with my cellphone above his work to take a photo. I reached as high above my head as i could to get them all in — where’s a drone when you need one? I wish I could’ve fit more of his narrow gauge work or his Chicago railroads throughout the decades or his story on the end of the Green Bay & Western or Norfolk & Western No. 611 and its crew and all of its angles. I hope you enjoy the February Gallery. I think you will be as pleased as I was with the selections. The issue should be in your mailboxes soon, or you can pick it up on newsstands Jan. 8, 2019.
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