TU To House Bob McCormack Collection

By Scott Thompson, The News On 6

TULSA, OK -- For 68 years, Bob McCormack worked in Tulsa as a professional photographer.  And over that time, until his death in 2003, he amassed a collection of photo negatives that grew to weigh more than five tons.

Now, thanks to the foresight of the University of Tulsa, and Bob McCormack's son, John, that collection of a million images and 500 cameras will be preserved so that we might remember a city never-to-be again.

There was a time, in a big house on Carson, when every Tulsa bride-to-be dreamed of having her picture taken standing on the staircase.  It was Bob McCormack's staircase.

He knew it was a nice place, an elegant place to record a young lady's most special dress and that wedding day.

But, Bob McCormack was much more than a wedding photographer.

From the day in 1935 he rode the train from Kansas City to a job with the Tulsa World, Bob was hell-bent on capturing the spirit of his new neighbors, both plain and fancy, who made his adopted home such a captivating place.

"I think my father's work was so special because he was such a warm and caring human being," said John McCormack.

From the newspaper, to chief photographer at the Douglass Aircraft Plant during the war, where Oklahomans were turning out the big Liberators and Dauntlesses and Invaders, prairie folk charged with taking back the skies from tyrants.

Bob turned their gritty, monotonous, work into art.  And, along the way, he never threw a single negative away.

So now, as John combs through hundreds of file boxes in preparation for the sale of the family home, he's overwhelmed by the scope and scale of his father's work:  at least a million images stuffed in boxes.

McCormack's Tulsa

When he began his studio business after the war, Bob McCormack became the go-to-guy with a camera.

He photographed the city's rich folks and their fancy parties, and its regular folks and their simple pleasures.   The downtown movie palaces and the visiting stars and starlets who came to town to fill the seats and the ushers charged with keeping you in those seats.

There are pictures of Bob Wills playing his fiddle on the stage at Cain's with admiring young girls just adoring him from the audience.  He recorded it all.

Bob loved to fly, so he'd shoot the city out an airplane window.  It was a city straining in all directions, shouting to the world of possibility and wealth, built on the backs of men in the oil patch and the rail yards.  A city with dirt under its nails and smoke in its lungs that showed off its softer side with a new rose garden.

A photo taken by Bob, up there at the peak of a hook-and-ladder with his big wooden box camera.

"He said that on that ladder that it moved about a foot or 18 inches that it was just swaying back and forth, now I don't know about you but I lost my ability to climb tall ladders when I was about 28," said John McCormack.

Bob never lost that hope for the next great shot.  It's why he always carried a camera.   And, why we can look back on views we'll never see again.  Stores where we'll never shop again.  Restaurants where we'll never eat again.  Pride we'll never feel again. 

It's why we can feel the heat still of a downtown tank-car fire.  And, sense the desperation of watching the Coliseum fall victim to a lightning strike.

"He heard about it and rushed down there to capture images cause he knew how important that was.  He was not paid to do that, he just knew it was important," said John McCormack.

And five years after his father's death, a man he idolized, John McCormack, who took over the family photography business, is grieving still.

There's just no room at the new place for the collection of a man who never threw anything away.

So as the crews from the university sort through the beautiful old studio box cameras, one of which Bob still uses, he's been pausing longer in the attic these days, surrounded by his dad's collection, his tools of the trade.

"My dad's passion for photography went far beyond the normal professional.  He absolutely loved creating images in the camera," said John McCormack.

And, whether they were captured on Tulsa's most sought-after staircase or in the streets of a city that once-was, Bob McCormack couldn't turn away from the daily drama that played out before him.  And now, neither can we.

 "I've grieved during these last months for the life that I had with my dad, but my wife helped me, she said you are going through labor pains of the rebirth of your father's work," said John McCormack.

Still as fresh as the day they were struck on a negative.  As bold and thoughtful as that moment when Bob McCormack, one eye squinting, one eye wide open, opened the shutter, and handed us our history.

"Tulsa loved my dad and my dad dearly loved Tulsa," said John McCormack.

John McCormack moves his photography business to a new address soon at 123 East 18th Street.

Beginning Thursday morning at 9 o'clock, and continuing through Saturday, the family's having an estate sale at their home, 1610 South Carson.

TU will put Bob McCormack's work in temperature-controlled storage, and plans to digitize it so it will be available online, but that will take, conservatively, at least five years to accomplish.

John McCormack hopes to be there helping along the way.