Factiva

THE LAST TIME I saw Carroll Walker, I happened to be looking down from a window of Kirn Memorial Library's Sargeant Room. I spotted the great photographer cycling smartly along City Hall Avenue astride his antique three-speed, tweed jacket immaculate and bow tie trim as usual, blue-gimlet eyes narrowed and vigilant behind gold-rimmed spectacles, camera and lenses strapped securely at his back. I remember musing that Norfolk seemed to be in good hands indeed that morning.

Carroll was on the case.

That wasn't long before he died, at 86, four years ago. He left a magnificent legacy of moments seized firsthand from our history with his massive photographic collection, now residing in that same Sargeant Room. Because Carroll Walker made it his lifelong business to see the city clearly, we can.

"Ever since I was a kid," he told me once, "I've been tramping about the old town. And a bicycle has greater flexibility than a car, what with the traffic, the parking and all that. I like to jump on my bike and head hell-bent-for-election downtown on it like what one friend of mine called `an old hound dog with a bumblebee on its tail.'

"I keep my camera with me at all times; you never know what insignificant thing might be very important later."

To Walker, everything was evidence. He carefully preserved the pictures of others and relentlessly recorded his own. The results trace Norfolk's changing physiognomy from its birth in 1680 through its dramatic expansion since World War II.

Now Norfolk native and historian Amy Waters Yarsinske has produced Norfolk, Virginia: The Sunrise City by the Sea, A Tribute to Photographer Carroll H. Walker, Sr. (Donning, 208 pp., $29.95). In the course of her meticulously researched, lavishly illustrated look at the city, she manages to preserve not only a sizable chunk of Norfolk's past, but a measure of its character as well, in the intense but good-humored personality of Walker. His sharp conservator's eye informs the text.

Included is a typically self-deprecating portrait Carroll took of himself in a top hat beside a poster from the old Gaiety Theater. Prominent on the poster is bygone "T.N.T." burlesque star Rose La Rose. Beneath all this is emblazoned Walker's wry pseudonym, "the Matthew Brady of East Main Street."

"I met Carroll in 1986," recalls Yarsinske, 30, who lives with her naval flight officer husband and two children in Colonial Place. "I had an urban planning project, and I needed help. So I called him up, and we were two hours on the phone."

She wanted to get a feel for the placement of the old buildings along Granby Street downtown, so Walker promptly met Yarsinske there and showed her, in person and on foot.

"He was 82," she notes. "He had a quick step. And he talked the whole time."

Walker captured her completely, the way he had so many moments from vantage points on street corners, rooftops and coal piers.

"He showed us what Norfolk was really all about," Yarsinske says of his pictures. "He gave us back our history. Without it, there would be an enormous gap."

She reveres that history as he did. Yarsinske was chairwoman of the Port Norfolk Bicentennial Committee. She's pursuing a doctorate in urban studies at Old Dominion University.

Her book salutes Walker and the corps of photographers whose work he collected. Here's the somber, Indian club-brandishing gym class of the 1897 YMCA. Here's a buckled Granby Street Bridge, crippling trolley cars of the Bay Shore Line in 1916.

Here's beamish Babe Ruth, the Sultan of Swat himself, putting in a 1934 appearance on the Washington Boat Docks at the foot of Colley Avenue and Front Street.

Yarsinske wraps these images in detailed, affectionately commemorative prose that recalls the churches, hotels, saloons and - above all - people of a vigorous port city.

"Navy town?" inquires the author. "Not just. Norfolk has been about a lot more than that - why, this is the cradle of our nation's history."

No wonder she and Walker got along so well.

Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan College.

Jacket photo by H. D. VOLLMER Photo hand-colored by LORI WILEY

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