Oh, Beth, I hardly knew ye!

You've been here 16 years,

but I wasted the first 13 of those, and now you're moving. Can't even

remember when or how I met you.

Beth Snipes shot her first

picture for The Citizen in December of 1995, so I guess we first saw each

other at the weekly staff meeting. I knew only that she was The Photographer.

There's no hard and fast rule about who takes the pictures in this newspaper

you'll notice that the reporter who writes the story often takes his own

but eventually, my editors got tired of the blurry film I'd turn in with

stories and suggested we call Beth instead.

I was a bit intimidated, didn't

know if I dared ask her to shoot pictures myself. When I finally got up

the nerve, it was the beginning of one of the most precious relationships

of my life. And the more I bossed her around, the more fun we had.

Beth grew up in Doylestown,

Penn., a suburb of Philadelphia, a second-generation American on both

sides her maternal grandparents immigrants from Poland, her paternal grandfather

the only one of four brothers who left Ireland and came to the States.

She took a degree in art at a small college in Erie, then decided she

didn't want to teach.

She and John were married before

she found her muse at a baseball game the Phillies won. She saw the photographers

taking pictures and declared, "I want to do that!" John scraped

together the money for her first camera and she went to the Philadelphia

College of Art at night, passing off babies in the driveway when John

came home from work. Starting as a stringer for a small paper, she worked

her way up to full-time and began winning awards for her work.

She's amazing. I've seen her

risk life and limb well, nice shoes, at least for pictures, like balancing

on the slippery bank of a pond to get an interesting angle on a crane

setting a bridge in place. She so charmed the pilots at Falcon Field that

they regularly took her up for aerials. When she got a ride in a jet to

preview an air show, she proved she can handle words as descriptively

as film by writing a first-person narrative of the flight for The Citizen.

She comes by her artistic talent

and love of photo-journalism honestly. The monumental force in her life

was her father, Jerry Callahan, political cartoonist for the now-defunct

Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. As a child, Beth would take his panels

in to the paper all by herself, riding trains and buses, and felt so grown

up.

Her dad, who died of cancer

at 59, was a good friend of fellow cartoonist Bil Keane, whose "Family

Circus" started in the Bulletin. Beth used to summer with the real

Jeff and Dolly and P.J. and Billy. She doesn't think it odd that she also

knows the guy who invented duct tape.

Hers is an eclectic circle.

I love her best for her wacky

sense of humor, typified by the answer she gave when I asked her whom

she would invite to dinner if she could have anyone, living or dead. "Dr.

Seuss and Ogden Nash," she replied instantly.

We've been grieving the dissolution

of our team, when it dawned on me that we've actually worked together

only a half-dozen or so times our friendship has thrived through e-mail.

And that will work as well between here and North Carolina as within Fayette

County, Ga.

With John already at his new

job and their daughters grown and gone, it has fallen to Beth to sell

the house while she and son Johnny and Aunt Grace, 94, are still living

in it.

She wrote: "Tuesday afternoon

Election Day someone was coming to look at the house so I had to load

Aunt Grace and the dogs in the car and make myself scarce. I was driving

around when my car started making the oddest sound, like I had a flat

tire or something was stuck under the car. I pulled into a driveway and

found the tires were okay. I started driving again and the noise was louder.

"I was getting a big knot

in my stomach worrying who I was going to call when the car died... I

kept getting out to see if a stick or something was wedged underneath.

As I got back in once again I glanced at the roof of my car, and lo and

behold, my 'I voted' sticker was stuck there by an edge just flapping

in the wind, making all that noise. The freedom to vote can be hard sometimes."

When I write her, I sometimes

sign myself "Brenda Starr," or "BS," which is also

her monogram, and not a very elegant one. Except, as I once wrote her,

her real name must be Elizabeth. No, she replied, her mother had risked

excommunication from the church to name her just plain Beth, and "BS"

she is.

I asked her to shoot a couple

of stories that required her to be on scene early in the morning. She

wrote back and said, "No one can boss me around like you can and

you probably won't get away with it with anyone else. Who else would shoot

a 7 a.m. assignment, then lock her keys in the car with her equipment

in the trunk? I had to call and wake John. Thank goodness he owed me one.

He took it quite well."

The collaboration I loved best

was the story I wrote about her accompanying a Baptist missionary team

to Haiti. The pictures she brought back were tender, her effort extraordinary.

Under horrendous conditions, she had to swap her usual slacks for skirts

for cultural reasons: "We climbed a big mountain, and I'm carrying

all this equipment, wearing new boots, in a skirt, and I kept falling

down hills and tripping over logs. Many of the people who live at the

top of the mountain haven't been down in 10 years because it's too hard

to get back up."

She herself became a source

of amusement and amazement to the Haitians and had to pretend she didn't

notice them staring at her. She was deeply touched by their sweet affection

toward a fair-haired stranger, and came home changed. "How hard their

lives are, every day. It was easy for me to get through 10 days of no

electricity or any conveniences. I didn't have to worry where my next

meal was coming from, but so many Haitians do. It must be horrible to

look at your child and not know how you'll feed him.

"I was afraid I would

come home feeling very guilty about all I have. I don't. I'm very appreciative."

She quips that it took her so long to feel comfortable here because she

was a Yankee Catholic Democrat who asked for whole wheat bread before

it was easy to find here in the South. Maybe that's why I love her: Used

to be a Yankee myself, I like whole wheat, and I have Democratic leanings

but I got the religion thing right. No priest ever challenged my first

name.

Oh, BS, I'm kidding myself

that e-mail will be the same. And whom will I boss around now? Don't go.

Love, Brenda

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