AADL Talks To: Andy Sacks, Photographer and Documentarian

Wed, 09/25/2024 - 9:29pm

When: April 1, 2024

Andrew Sacks is an award-winning photographer and documentarian in the Ann Arbor area. He came to the University of Michigan in the late 1960s to study art and immediately joined the Michigan Daily newspaper, covering a variety of assignments, from sit-ins and student demonstrations to regional and national political campaigns. During this period, he also played jazz piano with various Ann Arbor musicians. Andy recalls the people and some of the many memorable events that shaped his life and work over the years. Andy’s vast photo negative collection is available at the Bentley Historical Library.

Transcript

• [00:00:09] AMY CANTU: Hi, this is Amy.
• [00:00:10] ELIZABETH SMITH: And this is Elizabeth, and in this episode, AADL talks to Andrew Sacks. Andy is a professional photographer and filmmaker in Washtenaw County, where he's lived and worked since he was a student at the University of Michigan. Andy shares memories of photographing student activities on campus, from street riots, sit-ins, and protests when he worked as a photographer and editor for the Michigan Daily. He talks about some of the famous events and people he's had the privilege of capturing on film over his long career, and how Ann Arbor has changed over the years.
• [00:00:37] AMY CANTU: Hi, Andy. Thanks for coming today.
• [00:00:44] ANDY SACKS: Nice to see you, Amy and Elizabeth, both.
• [00:00:48] AMY CANTU: Could you start with giving us a little information? Where were you born and raised and what brought you to Ann Arbor?
• [00:00:55] ANDY SACKS: I was born in Detroit at Harper Hospital in 1947. We lived in Detroit on the Northwest side for about five years, and then in the post-war prosperity of the 50s, my dad bought a house in Huntington Woods around 11 Mile road and Woodward, and I spent the next 12, 13 years living there. I had an interest in photography that my father encouraged. He had served in the military in Europe and came home with some cameras. I'm not sure if he bought those or what, but they ended up in our household, and he showed me a little bit about them. But before he let me take possession of the gear, he gave me a book that was a Kodak publication, basically explaining photography, processing the film, and f stops, and shutter speeds. He asked me to read the book and I finished it, and he said, ''Now, good, go read it again. When you're done with it the second time, I'll give you two of these cameras.'' That really did stir my interest in photography. I worked with the high school newspaper and the high school yearbook. I was pretty much committed to photography. I had also been a pianist and a piano player since starting piano lessons when I was 8 years old. I was also interested in maybe pursuing that career, but I think I became convinced that you could be a very good musician and make a mediocre living. Or you could be a pretty good photographer and make a decent living and shifted my focus toward that, even in high school. I wanted to go to college, and it was in the time of the Vietnam War, and college was looked at as a safe harbor in that era. My grades were terrible. In my junior year, I just really failed at second-year algebra failed at chemistry. My mother came to visit. You know how they have those open houses for the parents to visit the teachers? My mother Bea was at the open house, and she went up to the teacher afterwards and asked her, she says, ''How come Andy got a D in your class?'' The teacher turned to her and said, ''Well, because we're friends, you and I, Bea, that's why he got a D.'' With grades like that, I wanted to go to a good school, but I didn't think the University of Michigan would accept me in the Literature Science and Arts program, so I applied to the art school, and they had plenty of room, and I believe they needed to fill their quota of students. In that era, you were not even required to submit a portfolio. I couldn't draw to save my life. I had taken one or two art classes, but my hand-eye coordination and the ability to translate what I saw in the world onto a flat piece of paper with a pencil -- it did not exist. They took me anyway. I come out to college, and you have to take these requirements, basic drawing, figure drawing, three-dimensional design. It's the first week of my college career. I'm in the art school, Richard Wilt, the drawing teacher, basic drawing. kneels down beside my desk and looks at what I'm doing with a pencil and asks me, ''What are you doing here?'' It turns out my wife, Ann, became very good friends with him years later. But he just shook his head and he said... You know, and I look back at those professors, they were in their 40s, maybe 50 years old. They had us young kids to try and mold and shape. Some of us like me had zero talent in terms of being able to draw and do those things. But one thing Richard Wilt did teach me was how to look at things and see how light fell on objects in the world, how it fell on rocks, how it fell on little stuffed animals, how a person's face could be shaped with light. Those skills I still use today. I think of light as a fluid actually now. He didn't mention that, but that's how I came to embrace the concept. That's the first part of my college career.
• [00:05:39] ELIZABETH SMITH: I'm curious. Did they have an emphasis on photography at the art school during that period?
• [00:05:44] ANDY SACKS: They had two teachers, Phil Davis and another fellow named Ryder. Phil was a practicing commercial photographer, so he was really more up my alley than I don't know what Ryder's first name was. He had been an industrial designer, Professor Ryder, but not much of a photographer. Phil knew f Stops, emulsion, numbers, camera mechanisms. He was a much better teacher, except when you came to the question of, "Well, how much should I charge for doing this work? I'm doing a little freelancing on the side.'' Phil said, ''Well, Andy, I think you should charge as much as you can get.''
• [00:06:27] AMY CANTU: Good advice.
• [00:06:28] ANDY SACKS: It was, actually. [LAUGHTER] I think that holds true throughout most of the industry stuff.
• [00:06:35] AMY CANTU: I want to ask you about the Kennedy assassination and how that impacted your interest in photography and also journalism. Can you talk a little bit about that?
• [00:06:46] ANDY SACKS: Sure. I was in the tenth grade the day that John Kennedy was shot. It was so surprising and so shaking an event that I really -- I'm just recounting that afternoon now, even as we're talking. We just didn't know what had happened, why it had happened. A few hours later, we've all been dismissed from school. We're back home with our parents. Of course, the TV has been on nonstop in everybody's household that afternoon and into the evening. I wanted to be a little closer to the event. I had known where the Free Press was published. The Detroit Free Press was based on Lafayette Street downtown Detroit. I thought, Well, maybe we should go down there and see the papers coming off the press. I had a friend who was interested in photography named Eric Burton, and he was a little older than me. I was a December birthday, and I had not yet turned 16 on November 23, 1963.
• [00:07:55] ANDY SACKS: But Eric had, he had an unrestricted driver's license. He could drive at night, he could drive without his parents. I called Eric and asked him would he like to try and make a trip downtown, and he was all up for it. We did and went down to the Free Press. In that day, there were no security guards around. We drove around to the back of the printing plant and just hopped up on the loading dock. I had a camera with 12 exposures of 120 Tri-X in it. I don't even think I took a second roll of film. Maybe I did. I made pictures of the paper coming off the press. That was my way of trying to document the event, at least as close as I could get. I made one picture of a pressman holding up the newspaper with just such a hollow, gaunt look on his face that it still communicates the terror and the surprise and the shock that we all had on that afternoon and into the evening.
• [00:09:01] ELIZABETH SMITH: I'm curious about how long you were at the university before you started working with the Michigan Daily and what that experience was like.
• [00:09:08] ANDY SACKS: About three days. [LAUGHTER] No, I was aiming in that direction, and I had a friend who had done a little work there, and I forget just exactly how I ended up there the first week or two, but they took me on. Tom Copi was instrumental in running the photo department then. There was another fellow there, Bob Sheffield, who lived across the road from Huntington Woods in Berkeley, Michigan, and so there was a little bit of a hometown touch there. They took me on as the newbie, as the guy who would come in on Saturday night, because he had no social life, and develop the film, make contact sheets, and do the printing. That was okay. It did actually give me a place to go on Saturday night. I felt like I was part of something, and at the end of those shifts on Saturday, I would take myself out and have breakfast at two o'clock in the morning, and I thought I was very cosmopolitan. There was a little diner called Red's Rite Spot around the corner from the paper. They were open all night. By the time October rolled around and the big homecoming weekend and the homecoming parade, Tom Copi thought that he should be the fellow to shoot the parade and the Queen's Court. I think he looked at that as a way to get more friendly with the women who were candidates for the Queen's Court. He knew the ropes a lot better than I did. There was also on that same afternoon a protest planned at the Ann Arbor Selective Service Office on Liberty Street, right by Haner's Barbershop. They said, "Andy, you go cover the sit-in. It's not going to be much. It's not as important as the homecoming parade, for sure." I went down to the office. It was on Liberty, right -- a little bit East of Main Street. I'd never been to a sit-in. Mostly, what they do is sit...until five o'clock rolled around. And then the protest really began because they were not going to get up, they were not going to leave. Walter Krasny, the chief of police was there, other officials showed up, and the news media by that time, had come out from Detroit. Some of those photographers were actually standing on the counter in the Selective Service Office. I thought, Wow, if they can stand on the counter, I guess I can stand on the counter. I wasn't even 18 years old. I was still 17. I'm a December birthday. I stuck with it. I had a camera that was Pentax that was built in Japan. It really wasn't an American camera. I had a pocket full of film. I had a flash unit that I used to use for high school football. I just stuck with the event as the sun went down and more police showed up. They ringed the entranceway. It was quite something. Thirty-nine people were arrested. I forget who the homecoming queen was that afternoon. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:12:31] AMY CANTU: Nobody cares. Well, those were really pretty intense times in Ann Arbor. You came right at the time when protests were happening, sit-ins, teach-ins. We had the South University riot, and you were there for all of this, weren't you?
• [00:12:48] ANDY SACKS: Right, I was.
• [00:12:49] AMY CANTU: Talk a little bit about the riot and some of the other events.
• [00:12:52] ANDY SACKS: Well, the South University riot. I don't remember a particular issue that was the trigger point or the focus. I think it was nice warm summer nights. I was living in a nice sub-light house up on West Ridge in Barton Hills. It was the home of a professor. Actually, it was Tom Copi's dad's friend who rented us his house. I was living with a French guy and his girlfriend, and we would make a nice dinner, and then we'd go to the riots. They lasted three nights. But I don't know what they were protesting. I do have pictures of Doug Harvey with a bullhorn in one hand and his other arm in a sling. Have you seen those?
• [00:13:39] AMY CANTU: Yep.
• [00:13:41] ANDY SACKS: I think he managed to hold a shotgun, too, at the same time. [LAUGHTER] I don't believe anyone got badly hurt from this. They did have a fogging machine out there where they laying down tear gas or something. We would put bandannas over our nose and our mouths, a makeshift gas mask. But we didn't stay out all night, and we went back home to Barton Hills, got a good night's sleep, and then rinse and repeat. That's what I remember then. The business with the Selective Service Office and Black Action Movement. What else was going on? The whole conversion of the SDS people into the Weather Underground moved me because I had been friends with Bill Ayers and Diana Oughten. They had asked me to come to their nursery school when they were running a program modeled after Head Start, and I shot some pictures there. There was one nice frame there where a girl's leaning over Diana's shoulder and Diana's reading to her. Very nice, warm look. That picture ended up in the New York Times the day after she blew herself up building bombs in the East Village. That was an odd way to get introduced to the New York Times, but it did introduce me to the New York Times.
• [00:15:05] AMY CANTU: Tell us more about Bill Ayers and your friendship with him and Diane.
• [00:15:09] ANDY SACKS: Well, he was a very charismatic guy. I don't know if that came through. Did you did you speak with him? He made friends easily.
• [00:15:19] AMY CANTU: He did.
• [00:15:20] ANDY SACKS: I don't think I was totally committed to his course, but he understood that I was there as a documentarian. Maybe he was taking advantage of me to get his message out. I didn't have any problem with that. I saw him years later, and he was still very easy to talk with, and there was a collegiality in our relationship.
• [00:15:47] AMY CANTU: Were you in the SDS?
• [00:15:49] ANDY SACKS: No.
• [00:15:50] AMY CANTU: No?
• [00:15:50] ANDY SACKS: No.
• [00:15:51] ELIZABETH SMITH: Do you have any other photographs from that early era that got traction, like the one that you saw in the New York Times?
• [00:16:00] ANDY SACKS: There were some frames I shot of the University of Michigan football team practicing before the Ohio State game in 1975. But because of some legal considerations and a trigger-happy coach, none of those pictures were ever published.
• [00:16:17] AMY CANTU: Well, let me read a little bit from War as They Knew It, Woody Hayes, Bo Schembechler and America in a Time of Unrest by Michael Rosenberg that gets at this story. "All Andy Sacks wanted was a picture of Bo Schembechler talking to Rick Leach, Sacks, who was a gradate and a freelance photographer called Michigan Sports director Will Perry. The photo would go out on the United Press International wire and likely run in newspapers around the country previewing the Ohio State game. Perry told Sacks the coach was way too busy to accommodate him, and many photographers would have given up. But when Sacks was a Michigan student, he had lived at 107 South State Street across from the Michigan Athletic campus, and he knew there were a few new apartment buildings there that had balconies. The football practice field was there, surrounded by a brick wall, one afternoon when the team was practicing, Sacks went to one of the new apartment buildings, walked up to the second floor, knocked on a few doors until a tenant let him in. Sacks walked in, then out to the balcony, where he set up his tripod, took out his camera and a 500-millimeter extreme telephoto lens, and started shooting. Two Michigan assistants walked across State Street to the ground floor of the apartment building, then hollered up to the balcony Sacks was on. 'Bo wants to see you!' And Sacks thought, now he's got time for a picture."
• [00:17:39] ANDY SACKS: I called Will Perry and as I had done in the past, by this time, I'd been out of college five years, and we had done these advanced pictures almost every week before a big game, and I'd put him out on the UPI wire. I think I said when I was signing off with him that day, and he said, "Don't you know what week this is? Don't you know how busy Bo is?" I think I said, Well, don't forget that I asked you formally to do this, because I did have a plan B already in my mind. Now he had time to talk to me and I said, "I don't need to talk to him" I already had some pictures made. I remember the coaches, these assistant guys, clapping their hands together, pointing across the street and hollering. "He won't come, Bo!" And I thought, I'll just stand my ground here, I'm up above them, I've got the catbird seat. I didn't expect that Bo would dismiss the practice, really, or halt it in order for him to come over and talk to me. Not only did he come over, but the whole football team came with him and it was at that point when I said to myself, This didn't look so good. Do you want to go in with a story, Amy?
• [00:19:10] AMY CANTU: Sure. "Almost 28 years old, Sacks was no wallflower. He'd been arrested on the job once before for taking pictures one night of community high school kids cutting down highway billboards. The charge was a felony, aiding and abetting the malicious destruction of property." Can we just stop for a minute and have you tell us a little bit about that situation with the community?
• [00:19:31] ANDY SACKS: That was Community High School kids who wanted to beautify America and the way they were going to do that was by cutting down existing billboards and they had been at this for a while. I had been out of school for a couple of years, but Jonathan Miller was a reporter, a British guy who was still working with the Daily and had a Brit's nose for news that way. They had a lot of tabloids over there and I think Jonathan wanted to get his foot in the door with that work. He made connections with these kids at Community High school, being very careful not to ask them their names. We arranged to go out with them one night when they were doing another mission on US 127 out west of Ann Arbor and north of I-94. and they had bow saws. They didn't have noisy equipment, but they had it down, they were a team already, and they cut down a very big billboard that was held up with probably eight telephone poles. It was advertising Bronner's Christmas tree ornaments in Frankenmuth, Michigan. The thing came down in about 45 minutes, it was dark but, like I had talked to you about light being a fluid and how important it was -- how I had learned the importance of light back in my first year in college. I had brought some flash equipment with me so we lit up the damn billboard and the kids cutting it down. Not just one flash, two flashes, one on either side, to get a nice modeling look on all the phone poles. I was treating it like a product shot almost. Well, the flashing attracted the attention of the farmers who lived maybe a half a mile away. By this time, the kids had cut the billboards down, and they were gone and I'm there with Jonathan, and we're just cleaning up, packing up the equipment. The farmers drive up, a couple of them in a pickup truck, and they brought guns, Amy. They brought guns. I had a camera, and they had two shotguns, and they were going to make a citizen's arrest. You've talked to Fred Labour? Fred Labour and Jay Cassidy were driving the getaway car.
• [00:22:05] AMY CANTU: That's a great team.
• [00:22:08] ANDY SACKS: Jay would go on to be a very well-known and skilled Hollywood film editor, Fred went on to be a Country and Western star. But that night, they were driving a Volvo, and they had dropped me and Jonathan off and were just circling around on the 127 highway to see what was going on. They said later when we saw those guys pull up in the pickup truck, we just decided that maybe we should just get the hell out of there and leave you to fend on your own. The farmers made a citizens arrest, and for them that meant having the truck's headlights pointed at us, and they would walk in front of the truck as it went in reverse, all the time, holding their guns aimed at us.
• [00:22:57] AMY CANTU: Wow.
• [00:22:58] ANDY SACKS: Pretty cool? Jay should have been there with the film camera. But he wasn't, he was on his way home so we were arrested and spent the night in jail. They took all my cameras.
• [00:23:15] AMY CANTU: No.
• [00:23:17] ANDY SACKS: But I had anticipated some trouble, so before the police got there -- to the farmer's field, there was a state police that showed up -- I had rewound the film out of the camera and put new film in and made it look like that was the film that I'd been shooting.
• [00:23:33] AMY CANTU: That was smart.
• [00:23:34] ANDY SACKS: It was smart.
• [00:23:37] AMY CANTU: Back to the Bo Schembechler story. So he comes across the field with the team. A few minutes later, you saw Bo Schembechler and most of the football team, and you were worried about getting your ass kicked? You asked the guys living in the apartment to call the police, Schembechler and his troops came into the building up to the second floor into the apartment and demanded that you turn over the film. "You have no scruples!" Schembechler barked.
• [00:24:05] ANDY SACKS: He was at this point livid. I got to understand what that word really means, it doesn't mean that you turn red in the face, it means that the blood drains from your face. That it's a protective defensive mechanism we all have to prevent more blood loss in the case of an attack and I suppose he figured that I was the attacker and that he really let loose. I got him on the phone with the sports editor, Rich Shook in Detroit, and Rich vouched for me, because Bo said, "You have no scruples. What are you doing here?" Rich said he's just on an assignment, he's just getting a picture. We just wanted a picture of you talking to Rick Leach or you talking with one of the leaders of the team. That didn't fly with Bo, he just kept yelling at Rich over the phone. I believe that Rich had the phone up to his ear and was typing everything, transcribing the conversation, because it did go out on the wire. This was a big deal. The next morning, I turned on WJR, and J. P. McCarthy had nominated me as his loser of the day. You would think that that would be a detriment to your career, but actually, it wasn't. My clients in Detroit, all said, Hey, that's our Andy. Hey, he's on the radio. What did he do now? The district attorney, was it district attorney? I guess it would have been William Delhey. He wanted to charge me with a crime, which would have been stealing trade secrets.
• [00:25:51] ANDY SACKS: That law was on the Michigan books to prevent guys from hanging out from trees outside the Chrysler proving grounds, the GM proving grounds, stealing the design work, or spying on the design work while they were taking pictures of these very long lenses. Jim Dunne from Popular Science, was known as the king of this work. They put this law on the books, I think, in part to thwart his efforts. But if they could capture Andy with the same law, why not do it? The police said to me, We're going to take your cameras and your tripod, and you can pick that stuff up at the police station later. I kind of protested. But by this time, I had switched the film out.
• [00:26:46] AMY CANTU: [LAUGHTER] That's becoming a habit.
• [00:26:50] ANDY SACKS: Yeah, it's becoming a habit. By this time I had switched the film out, and so my protests were kind of theatrical, but not based in fact. They took my cameras, they took the tripod. They took all that stuff down to the police station. I believe they did take the film out of the cameras before giving the cameras back to me. They kept that, and they said, We're not going to process it. We're just going to hang onto it until halftime on Saturday coming up. We'll give you your film back at halftime during the football game. Come up to the press box to get it. I thought, okay, Well, we'll see. But I had the real pictures in my pocket.
• [00:27:33] AMY CANTU: [LAUGHTER] What did you do with those?
• [00:27:37] ANDY SACKS: I processed them in my lab on First Street. I had a little dark room in the house I was renting. I processed them, looked at them. Then I called UPI and said, "I got the film, and I can make some prints" and they said, "Great, just get him out on the Chicago wire, get him out on the Midwest wire. We can use them." I said "I'm happy to do that, as soon as you give me the name and phone number of the attorney that's going to represent me, because I don't think I'm going to get out of this scott free." With the billboard bandits thing, I did have an attorney, and he played an important part in putting that whole situation to bed. But I wasn't going to go this alone. UPI said, "Well, why would you need an attorney?" I said, "Well if you don't know, I think I'll just sit on the pictures here." So they were never published.
• [00:28:28] AMY CANTU: Were you concerned about Bo Schembechler's attention to you after that, or did it just sort of die down?
• [00:28:36] ANDY SACKS: I think I came out of it better than he did.
• [00:28:38] ELIZABETH SMITH: Yeah. Going back in time a little bit, I just wanted to ask you about the pictures from the 1968 Democratic Convention.
• [00:28:47] ANDY SACKS: I did go there with, how many other kids from the daily? I think there were eight of us in total. I didn't get extraordinary photographs at that event. The police were not very gentle with anybody that was in their way. I did make one picture of a situation on one of the bridges, I think it was Balboa Street Bridge near Grand Park, where a waitress on her way to work was stopped by the National Guard who took their bayonets and stuck them into the driver's side window to prevent her from going on any further. Jay Cassidy got some good pictures at that same event, and there was a poster that was made of it.
• [00:29:30] AMY CANTU: Now, you did take some pretty extraordinary footage of Robert Kennedy. Can you talk a little bit about that?
• [00:29:36] ANDY SACKS: That was in May of 1968, and by then I had been on the newspaper staff and photo editor for a number of years. Life Magazine sent a photographer to Detroit, Magnum Photos, big international picture agency, sent a photographer to Detroit. The Daily sent two photographers to Detroit. Again, the guy who drove the getaway car was now behind the camera. It was me and Jay Cassidy covered that. They had set up for the photos and the film crews, two convertibles, one that would precede Kennedy's car, and he was in a convertible also a death-defying move, you would think, right?
• [00:30:24] AMY CANTU: Yeah.
• [00:30:25] ANDY SACKS: I mean, this was just about three years, five years after his brother was shot. Kennedy was in one convertible group of photographers were in another convertible that had its top down were preceding that car. The second group of film cameramen and photographers were following in another convertible. I think I was in the front convertible riding next to Bill Eppridge, who was the Life Magazine shooter on the job. I counted 12 guys in that convertible. It was an illustration of that saying "asses and elbows." But I got some very good pictures. Chris Matthews wrote a biography of Bobby Kennedy to coincide with the 50th anniversary of his death. For weeks, I would see him, Chris, hold up this book on TV before the publication date, hold the book up and show the cover, and say, this book is coming out three weeks from now. I looked at the TV screen and said, "That picture looks like I was there." But I didn't think too much more about it. Because I didn't see this image having been licensed by Getty, which was handling that work for me. I thought, Well, if it's gone out, I would know about it. The book was published and I got a call from a friend in Detroit who was a Kennedyfile or Bobby Kennedyfile. He did lots of research on Kennedy's visit. This guy's name is Paul Lee. He called me up and he said, "Well, Andy, I see your picture on the front of Chris Matthews' book. Congratulations." After Paul called, I asked my wife who was in Ann Arbor that weekend to stop at Nicola's and pick up a copy of the book and she did. But before she got home, she called me up and she says, "Andy, it looks like your picture, but it's got somebody else's name under it." I said, "Well, what's the name?" She said, "Well, it says Bill Eppridge." I said, "Well, we were all asses and elbows in that convertible. He was probably right next to me and shot the same pose, the same moment." She brings a book home. We look over the contact sheets. Who did I get on the phone to look at the contact sheets with me? What's that guy's name who was driving the getaway car?
• [00:32:54] AMY CANTU: Jay Cassidy.
• [00:32:54] ANDY SACKS: Jay Cassidy. Shows up again [LAUGHTER]. I sent him the contacts, and I sent him a copy of the cover of the book. I said, using your editor's eye, tell me, is this the same frame or not? He says, "Yes, it's definitely the same frame."
• [00:33:12] AMY CANTU: What did you do?
• [00:33:14] ANDY SACKS: I called Getty. I said, what's going on here? You're handling this picture. Now it's on the cover of Matthews' biography, and it's got Bill Eppridge's name under it. They said, "Wow, that's not right. Let's look at the sales records." I don't know how deep you want me to get into this. They go back and they look in the sales records, and they say, Andy, you gave us those pictures 12 years ago. We've been selling them and actually, the money's been going somewhere else, and we don't know where it's gone or who's been getting credit for it. I got a little more interested in it, and Steven Silpe, was a writer at the Michigan Daily, but now he is an attorney in New York City, he and I conferred on this, and he said, Well, why don't you dig around a little bit? If I do the digging for you and I leave my name and anybody's voicemail in my position, as soon as they hear that I'm an attorney the door slam shut. Why don't you try it on your own?" I called Simon and Schuster, and I played a little country dum. I said I'm just trying to figure out, I think this is my picture, but it's got Bill Eppridge's name under it. I got, as far as the woman who designed the cover on the phone, who said to me. We had Eppridge's photo in there. But at the last minute, they pulled it, and they substituted your picture.
• [00:34:47] AMY CANTU: What? Wow.
• [00:34:51] ANDY SACKS: I said, "I think that's mine." She says, "Yeah, it is yours." We try and unravel this whole thing. At Getty, they said to me, "Let's put you in touch with our attorney who can maybe help you get a little clarity on this. We're not sure which way we want to go on it but bear in mind that Simon & Schuster is a very good client of ours, and they can license a picture like this for an unlimited use and pay you $500, which we split in half." It didn't matter that they published 300,000 copies of the book. They put me in touch with the attorney and Heather, who was the intermediary, Heather Cameron, said, "Just sit down for a second cause I'm going to give you his contact information." I'm sitting down. His name is Andrew Sachs. But he spells it with an H. [LAUGHTER] How does this stuff happen? [LAUGHTER] I tracked down Bill Eppridge's widow. Everyone agreed that there was a mistake. Simon & Schuster said, "Well, I don't know how much we want to compensate you for this." Steven, the attorney said, "We'll see what we can do." But I got in touch with Bill's widow, and I said, "How do you think this happened?" She said, "I don't know, but I looked at the picture, too, and I saw his name under it and it didn't look like it was good enough to be any of Bill's work."
• [00:36:21] AMY CANTU: [LAUGHTER] You're just getting it from all quarters there. That's hilarious.
• [00:36:31] ANDY SACKS: It's a great picture.
• [00:36:32] ELIZABETH SMITH: Good enough to be on the cover of a book! [LAUGHTER]
• [00:36:35] ANDY SACKS: A couple of years later, I picked up a voicemail message from my business line. It's a woman saying, my name is Sybil Martin. I think you took my picture in Detroit 50 years ago with Bobby Kennedy. She's the girl that's reaching out to touch Kennedy's hand. She saw the picture. She called me up. She's a nurse, works in Ann Arbor. My wife and I had lunch with her at Weber's.
• [00:37:03] ELIZABETH SMITH: Nice. We talked to Peter Yates, and he mentioned that you gave him his start in town. Can you talk a little bit about his work and your connection with him?
• [00:37:13] ANDY SACKS: Peter and I met at the Blind Pig, where he was in charge of the bar and also making cheesecakes, which were very good. He also had an interest in photography, and we talked a lot about that. Eventually, he left the Blind Pig and devoted his working hours to photography. He assisted me for quite a while. We both learned a lot from that relationship. He taught me how to make a really good curry. But photography was our focus. He took to it very quickly and became good enough that he could go out and do these jobs on his own. We were sharing some clients. The New York Times was one of them. Business Week was another. Some of the Time, Inc. publications also called, and he and I would work out who was going to do the assignment. That worked out pretty well for quite a while. He then went out on his own.
• [00:38:12] AMY CANTU: Andy, I understand that in addition to photography, you continued with your interest in music as well, and you were at one point in a Texas Swing band. Can you tell us a little bit about the music you played and the venues that you played in?
• [00:38:29] ANDY SACKS: Michael Smith had a band called the Country Volunteers. I think we had in any given afternoon at Mr. Flood's party, five or six people in the band, I played piano, a couple of guitars, bass, drums. Michael was singing. We didn't make a lot of money, Amy. [LAUGHTER] Occasionally, we'd get thrown a bone by Ned, who managed the bar and said, well, we can have you guys in on Thursday or maybe a Wednesday night. One of those evening gigs, we had a regular audience who would come by and see us, and they would put one dollar or two in the pitcher by the door. That was the money we made for the night. This one night, there were five of us in the band, and at the end of the night, Michael says, "I don't know. We got 45 bucks in the pitcher." That would have been decent pay for one musician for one night, but we had to split it up five ways. [LAUGHTER] That meant nine dollars. Well, I was working as a photographer and the other people in the band had jobs, too. When Michael said, "Maybe I should take the $45 and go down to Village Corners and buy some instant lottery tickets." Nobody in the band protested because what were we going to be out nine bucks instead [LAUGHTER] of... We would have had a chance to win some more money. I'm not a gambler, but I told Michael it would be okay with me, and so did everyone else. The next morning, I got a call from him about 10 o'clock and he said, "Well, I went down to the Village Corners and I spent the first 40 bucks." And I said, "So, is it all gone, Michael?" He said, "Well, the first $40, we won five or six bucks." I said, "So now we're down to maybe a dollar each for last night's worth." [LAUGHTER] I said, "And then what happened?" He said, "Well, then I put a little more money in. We did a lot better." "Really?" "I won $10,000."
• [00:40:36] ELIZABETH SMITH: Oh, my gosh. Did you end up seeing any of that?
• [00:40:41] ANDY SACKS: Yes! [LAUGHTER] I ended up seeing 20% of that.
• [00:40:46] AMY CANTU: Excellent. Well, that was worth it.
• [00:40:49] ANDY SACKS: It was. I called my mother up that afternoon, and I said, "Mom, remember those piano lessons four bucks a throw? [LAUGHTER] I think I paid them all off last night."
• [00:41:00] AMY CANTU: Great. Now, you played with the Shobey Brothers, too. Can you talk a little bit about them?
• [00:41:06] ANDY SACKS: I played more... I didn't play much at all with Norman. But with Armando, I did play quite a bit. We had a band where I resurrected my high school band's name called The Continentals, I think, and we played out at a few places: The Golden Falcon when that was on Fourth Avenue, not far from where we are right now. Kales Waterfall Supper Club was another place out on Stadium and it later turned into a Szechuan restaurant. Armando was a great drummer. He was really a prince on the bandstand. He was always affable and agreeable and he had such a nice stage presence. It was really a pleasure to work with him. I talked with Fred Labour, another one of the getaway car drivers, who was a bass player the first couple of weeks we were out at Kales. Fred said, "Before you asked me to join your band, Andy, the last group I'd played with was in high school. Then I'm up there with Armando, who's a drummer from New York City." And he said, "I was a little frightened that I wouldn't be able to keep up or stand up," he said. "But Armando, he showed me where the pocket was." That's a musician's term of getting everything just in the groove. He said, "I got in that pocket and that was pretty nice." Armando had this magnetic personality where he could communicate with the audience just by giving them a big smile or a little bit of dance on the stage. He was just a pleasure to work with.
• [00:42:42] AMY CANTU: What was the style of music? How would you describe the music he played?
• [00:42:46] ANDY SACKS: In the beginning, it was straight ahead jazz, or silver tunes, things like that. Standards from the American songbook. Armando was a pretty decent singer. He would sing "Misty" and play the drums at the same time. He did a good job on that. Then I got more interested in Latin jazz. We had a band called Melodioso. A lot of good players came through that band -- Larry Mandeville, Howard White. Armando was in there. Reggie Smythe was a drummer from New York City. He was a conga player who he said learned to play congas in the orphanage. The kids in the orphanage would show him the different beats on the dining room table after supper was served. They'd work all this stuff out. Reggie was a stickler for--someone's got to play the bottom, another person plays the middle, another person plays the top. Armando played traps and timbales, and sang a bit. One of his best tunes was "Man Smart, Woman Smarter," [LAUGHTER] which was a Harry Belafonte tune that preceded the women's lib era probably 25 years but had a lot of currency in the '70s.
• [00:44:08] AMY CANTU: Nice.
• [00:44:11] ELIZABETH SMITH: I'm curious how your interest in photography changed over the years, especially with technology changing so much.
• [00:44:18] ANDY SACKS: I didn't become less interested in photography when digital came out. I think there might have been people who said, I'm not dealing with any of this stuff, and just walked away from it. But to me, making the images, recording the world out there... In some ways my work as a photographer from college up until today was like a graduate study class in life on earth. You get to see almost everything. I've been in Europe, I've been in Japan, been around this country. Whether or not you have a film camera or a digital camera, the camera is the access. The camera is the way you get into recording these things in the world and I just felt like I learned an awful lot with the camera around my neck. But I also made good pictures. As far as the digital medium and the digital protocols and workflow, I think there's a lot more work involved when you're shooting digital after the job is over. You got to go through that stuff. You can do enormous amounts of improvements, but it takes time. If you don't have a lab assistant who can do the work like you want it done, it's going to take your time. Now, this book I brought in where we documented the workers at the Ross School of Business when they were building it, I worked with Matt Sturm, who took all the files I created, shooting digital up there. I wanted it to look like these Irving Penn pictures I had seen that he shot in the '50s with a Rolleiflex and Tri-X or Panatomic-X film. Matt caught on to the way I wanted the files to look, and they look like they were shot on film, printed on poly contrast Number 3. In fact, one of the photographers in town came up to me and said, "Oh, I didn't know you were shooting film again." [LAUGHTER] The medium is important, but the draw for me was being able to go out and work in the world and do that image gathering.
• [00:46:33] AMY CANTU: I'm curious, Andy. You photographed a lot of famous people. In addition to Robert Kennedy, Timothy Leary, John Lennon, John Cage, Eldridge Cleaver. What are your thoughts about some of the photos that you've taken of...
• [00:46:46] ANDY SACKS: Well, I'll go back to that graduate course explanation. Ted Nugent, who I did quite a bit of work with when he was first starting out -- he's not a most favored national figure these days -- but he was decent to work with. I still have the earplugs he gave me. [LAUGHTER] With the encouragement "I wear these on the stage all the time." I made friends with Elmore Leonard, the mystery writer. He was an interesting guy to work with. We shot some pictures of Elmore posing for a Newsweek cover. He's standing inside a jail at the Detroit Police Station, at the lockup and the picture ran on the cover. Couple of months later, he said to me "That was really good for me. It boosted me from one list to another list, and I think, helped my career." I liked working with Lee Iacocca, who was a chairman of Chrysler for quite a while. Iacocca brought them back from the depths of their insolvency and the days when they didn't know if they could make payroll on Friday afternoons. I liked him. He was easy to work with. He was the kind of guy where, if you had something set up, and he said, "Okay, I'm here, how long is this going to take?" I'd say, "Well, I think, 15 minutes." He'd look at his watch and say, "Okay, it's 20 after 4:00. Let's go." [LAUGHTER] You knew that you had till 25 before 5:00 [LAUGHTER] to get your pictures. Well, we had been practicing and run tests and everything for a day before he showed up, so it wasn't too bad. But I liked that he didn't beat around the bush. He was the kind of guy you could have a conversation with about economics and business while you were doing the shots and felt that you were getting a reasonable representation of his thoughts and opinions.
• [00:48:46] ELIZABETH SMITH: You've lived in the area for a long time. How has Ann Arbor changed over the years for better or worse, in your opinion?
• [00:48:54] ANDY SACKS: You should have heard us driving up from State Street. We came in from State and Eisenhower and couldn't hardly tell where the hell we were by looking up in the sky. What's going on out here? Why don't you tell me?
• [00:49:10] ELIZABETH SMITH: [LAUGHTER] It's hard to keep up.
• [00:49:11] ANDY SACKS: Geez. The landmarks are totally gone. I think that apartment building where I was nearly arrested by Coach Schembechler is still there. But they built on the other side of the street a gigantic complex, on State Street. I don't know what it's called there, but I guess they practice inside there, maybe? They could have named the building after me. [LAUGHTER] How has it changed? I don't think I would have spent 10 years living here in my 20s and 30s if it was like it is today back then. It doesn't seem manageable. It doesn't seem as cozy.
• [00:49:57] AMY CANTU: Photos up at the Bentley: They've got a lot of your material up there. What are some of the gems that we might find in that collection? What stands out as a favorite photo or two that you just are really proud of having taken?
• [00:50:15] ANDY SACKS: I don't think they have this yet, but I did a long project for a magazine called Successful Farming, which some of my friends said was an oxymoron because farmers are always complaining about how bad things are. But I was down in Havana, Illinois, working with this one family farm. The project for the magazine was to commemorate their hundredth anniversary. It's like what you're doing here, maybe. They sent me out to a dozen family farms all across the United States. This wasn't exactly a farming picture, but there was one scene on the morning of this five-year-old girl's first day at kindergarten. Her mom took her out to wait for the bus in front of their house. The sun is pretty low because it's September. This little girl's waiting there by herself with a little backpack that's a little too big for her and the sun is just right. The mom is standing off to the side. You can't see the woman except for her shadow. I really like that picture. It's got this sense of expectation on the part of the little girl. As a dad, too, I can identify with that. I had three little girls go off to school. They all had their first day at kindergarten. That's one of them.
• [00:51:47] AMY CANTU: Oh, nice.
• [00:51:48] ANDY SACKS: It's easy to describe, too.
• [00:51:51] ELIZABETH SMITH: What are you most proud of?
• [00:51:54] ANDY SACKS: I have some pretty interesting daughters who span the gamut from one working at Adobe as a product manager, maybe? She's got an interesting career representing video editing software to the industry. Her twin sister's in Maryland, and she's running an organic hog farm and raising three kids out there. Third daughter is working at St. Joe's in the county here as a social worker in the neonatal unit. So they've all done very well. Proud of that. I made a documentary film about a community gospel choir about 10 years ago, called "Let's Have Some Church, Detroit Style." That was like me visiting a much different part of the state, really. It was in Detroit, mostly. Got to be good friends with a director and a number of singers in the choir. The film did win an Emmy Award regionally and was shown on PBS around the country. For me, that was an interesting way to top off my career, even though it wasn't still photography. It was still making images, telling stories, and we got to bring the music into it, too, which is another part of my life that's really important to me.
• [00:53:25] AMY CANTU: That feels like a really good place to end.
• [00:53:26] ELIZABETH SMITH: Thank you.
• [00:53:27] AMY CANTU: Thank you so much.
• [00:53:28] ANDY SACKS: I'm glad I could help you, and I'm happy that we talked.
• [00:53:30] [MUSIC]
• [00:53:33] AMY CANTU: AADL Talks To is a production of the Ann Arbor District Library.