A rascal in the sky – A Wee Blether

It has been seven years since I had the sublime good fortune to be pulled into the world of a 70-something rascal named Fred Frey Jr.

A great-grandfather, decorated wartime pilot, photographer and unapologetic prankster, Fred was relaxing one fine spring afternoon at an outdoor table at Brew Ha Ha coffee shop, entertaining his granddaughter. Ever inquisitive and never shy, Fred asked a cigar-puffing stranger clacking away on a laptop nearby, “Watchoo doin’?”

Pretending to be Jimmy Breslin, I should have admitted. “I’m working on an article,” I said. “I’m a writer for Baton Rouge Business Report.”

“A writer!” he said with delight. “I need a writer!”

I felt a twinge of unease. He told me he had a stash of old “pitchers” that might make a good book. “I need a writer to help me turn all those photographs into a story.” My naďve enthusiasm turned to dread. I imagined epic tedium and being trapped while this geezer fumbled through a lifetime of faded Polaroids.

I should have known from the twinkle in his eye how wrong I was.

His photographs were no mere “pitchers.” They were a treasure trove of documented history. Fred had spent much of his adult life flitting around the Baton Rouge sky, taking aerial photographs with a magnificent Swedish camera system.

It started when a savings and loan hired him after he returned from Korea. The company asked him to photograph some land that a customer wanted to borrow money on to develop into a subdivision.

For Fred, this was old hat. He became an expert at taking reconnaissance photos in Korea as a U.S. Army pilot. He was such a cocky 20-something, in fact, he once got chewed out by a famous general who spotted Fred climbing out of his plane with a quite unofficial pearl-handled revolver in his holster, and a very unofficial Boston Red Sox baseball cap on his hard little head. After a brief punishment, Fred wound up one of that general’s favorite personal pilots.

Back home, and over several decades, Fred singlehandedly documented the suburbanization of Baton Rouge. I say singlehandedly because he did much of it alone. He would literally dip the wing of his single-engine Cessna, pop open the window, stick his camera and his hard head into the roaring slipstream and snap away. It’s a miracle he never dropped that camera on some unsuspecting citizen below.

Sometime in the 1990s, it struck him how much Baton Rouge had changed. He would find an old picture of, say, Interstate 12 coming to a dead stop at Airline Highway, with nothing but parallel, bulldozed rows of dirt stretching east to the horizon. He’d travel the same flight path and take a modern version of the same photo, this time capturing an aging interstate hemmed in on all sides by seemingly unending subdivisions.

Fred created hundreds of then-and-now pairs. He and I spent three years poring over thousands of negatives, whittling them down to fewer than 100 pairs.

In 2009, LSU Press published Above Baton Rouge: A Pilot’s View Then and Now.

For Fred, who’s now 81 and happily retired in Southdowns with his beloved wife Martha, the book saved his life’s work from the obscurity of his attic.

My copy is already dusty on a shelf at home, but it’ll always remind me of the most unforgettable journey of my professional life.

Reach Tom Guarisco at [email protected].