Hometowns – Bear Lackett Chronicles

Excerpt from The Bear Lackett Chronicles – Part 3 in the Series

It has been a few weeks since Joanne sent me the photo slideshow used at Bear’s viewing in Wall NJ. I loaded up the photos in Aperture on my Mac and paged through the 50 static views. No sound, no commentary and no association to time and place. This is what I had of Steve “Bear” Lackett’s life and times before and after college, but not during. There were no photos documenting that time in his dash.

Before there was Bear – Steve as Davey

I wrote a quick email note to about 30 plus frat brothers requesting any photo that might fill gaps but it’s hard – we just don’t keep hard copy anymore, it’s digital or go digging. Buried deep in someone’s closet or storage chest, maybe even a smartphone, there might still be an existing out of focus memory of Bear.

The slideshow confirmed a premise – the best memory of a part of Bear’s dash would need to be recreated by those of us who experienced it, lived it. The usual suspects (see the earlier photo), those of us who gathered in Spring Lake NJ in June 2012, did just that, a quick recall of him while at the viewing and funeral.

So how did we get to the point where there was a Bear, a Bones, a Shaffno, a Peaches and so many other DSP dubbed brothers.

It started in the late 60’s in hometowns and continued at college into the early 70’s.

For me hometown was Syracuse, NY – for Bear it was Freehold, NJ. Here we both were influenced by the power years – the so-called years that changed everything – from 1968 through 1969, our senior year in high school and first semester at Maryland.

Springsteens’ My Hometown, from the 1975 Born To Run album gives a glimmer of life and times in Freehold – there is no complementary song for life then in Syracuse. But Springsteen’s song always spoke to me about my change – it was social change no matter where you called home.

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About Phil Fabrizio

Phil Fabrizio is an event, news and sports photographer in the Washington D.C. Metro area. He lives in North Potomac and has operated Sugarloaf Photography since 1985. He is a member of the Gaithersburg-Germantown Chamber of Commerce and serves on the board of the Glen Echo Partnership for Arts and Culture, Inc in Glen Echo. Stop by Phil's PhotoLoaf site or follow him on Twitter @Photoloaf. Find Phil's blog on MyMCMedia here.

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