Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, November 30, 1995 TAG: 9511300028
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
- Thomas H. Garver in "The Last Steam Railroad in America"
At nearly 81-years-old, O. Winston Link has achieved a degree of expertise in a few areas.
He's taken some of the most memorable photographs of steam locomotives in the world, for one thing.
And when it comes to ice cream on a stick and Howard Johnson's hotels, his wisdom may be unmatched.
``I'm kind of a stick ice cream specialist,'' he said. ``You can show me some stick ice cream and I can tell you if it's any good or not just looking at it.''
The best stick ice cream, Link will tell you, comes from Howard Johnson's. Though he is Brooklyn-born and still lives in South Salem, N.Y., he can rate just about every Howard Johnson's in Virginia. The one off Interstate 81 in Lexington, for instance, is tops, while he says the one at Abingdon has gone downhill.
Howard Johnson's was often Link's lodging of choice on trips to Roanoke and vicinity in the 1950s. That's when he was taking the black-and-white photographs of the last steam railroad in the country - the Norfolk & Western - that now hang in galleries worldwide.
Link will be back in Roanoke on Saturday to sign copies of his second - and according to him, his last - book of those pictures from 1 to 3 p.mat Ram's Head Book Shop in Towers Shopping Center. It's the only bookstore signing he has planned for ``The Last Steam Railroad in America'' (Harry Abrams, $49.50).
The book represents the light at the end of a long tunnel in which Link's life had been stalled in recent years. He's battled ill health, including heart bypass surgery, cataracts and failing knees. And then there's the stress of a bitter divorce from his second wife, Conchita Mendoza.
This summer, Mendoza was indicted in Westchester County, N.Y., for grand larceny in the disappearance of 1,400 of Link's prints, valued at more than $1 million.
But Link has weathered it all. He remains basically soft-spoken and easy-going, though he doesn't mind playing the cantankerous old man from time to time, and he's not above the occasional four-letter word.
Some 40 years after he took his famous photos, he still is not tired of talking about them. There is a passion in his voice, and a gentle reverence for the people and the culture he captured forever in those pictures.
His success has been a long time reaching the station; Link's train photos weren't really discovered by the art world until 13 years ago. But then, fame is not what he was after anyway.
``I never expected that. I didn't aim for that. All I wanted was to get some nice pictures of trains at night.''
But when Link got to Virginia he found much more than trains. An entire culture was built against the tracks from Shaffer's Crossing down every line of the railroad. It was a dying bit of Americana.
``I found that when I got there," he said recently from his home in New York. "It was a great American portrait, of kind and decent and gentle people.''
This latest book, more than his first one, ``Steam, Steel and Stars,'' focuses on those people as much as the trains themselves. Among the 127 illustrations are many portraits of everyone from passengers and conductors to engineers and the announcer at the Roanoke passenger station.
``The Last Steam Railroad in America'' covers the Norfolk Division, the tiny Abingdon Branch, and downtown Roanoke and Shaffer's Crossing, where Link started his whole project. Between the two books, he's now covered every part of the N&W (now part of the Norfolk Southern system).
Unlike ``Steam, Steel and Stars,'' the new book contains daytime pictures and color plates. Link took more than 2,000 pictures of the N&W, but he said, ``this is the cream of it.''
Link numbered all of his negatives, and still can refer to specific pictures by their number.
That's not bad for a man whose ex-wife suggested he had Alzheimer's disease. He divorced Conchita Mendoza two years ago after a nasty legal battle. Link had accused Mendoza of manipulating his finances, making off with prints and equipment, and having an affair with the man Link had hired to restore a steam engine he owns.
According to a 1994 New York Times story, court records showed Mendoza was instructing dealers to send proceeds from sales of his pictures to a post office box she had obtained. The judge awarded Link and his nephew $5 million.
Mendoza spent two months in jail for claiming a picture of her with black eyes after cosmetic surgery showed the results of abuse by Link. Then she disappeared.
This summer police found her in another New York county living as Mrs. Edwin Hayes. That's the name of the man Link had hired to fix his train. She is currently out on bail. Her trial is set for Dec. 14.
Link says he doesn't expect to see the missing prints again.
``She'll just sweat it out out of meanness,'' he said. ``But then I hope she winds up in jail for 20 or 50 or 100 years.''
He tries not to dwell on the subject, he said, but, ``she took everything out of my life but my reputation and my N&W negatives.''
It's those pictures of long-retired trains that keep Link going. His love for trains dates ``almost to birth.'' He remembers riding the subway to Jersey City, N.J., as a teen-ager just to spend a day looking at trains.
By the 1950s, he had his own photography studio and was doing commercial work, but he was carefully watching the slow death of steam railroads in newspapers and magazines.
He still remembers the headline about a New York railroad that sent him on his mission: ``Main Central Loses Steam.''
Soon after that, he began packing his large format cameras and a platoon of lights and flashes into his Buick and headed south. He'd come down the Pennsylvania Turnpike, take U.S. 11 south into Roanoke and check into a Howard Johnson's.
``I never did have the time or the money,'' he said, ``but I had to do this.''
He worked as long as a week at one location, arranging up to 60 flashes for a single picture.
He rarely packed a lunch, ``except sometimes I would get a caramel-coated pecan stick from the Howard Johnson's and go out to the Montgomery Tunnel and watch the [Powhatan] Arrow come through.''
He made friends wherever he went. Once, while he was making sound recordings of a train returning from Crewe to Roanoke, his wallet fell out onto the tracks somewhere. The next day, the train crew brought it back, having watched both sides of the tracks for about 100 miles looking for it.
``I didn't even look in it,'' he said. ``I never would have thought of it.''
In the two books of pictures he's published, Link says, he's represented nearly every job on the railroad. His only regret is that he didn't take more pictures of the shops where the ``best trains in the world'' were built.
He still prints some of his old pictures, but he's done taking new ones. He has a small camera, but he says the rare large-format cameras he used in the 1950s disappeared with the prints his ex-wife is accused of stealing.
``Everything is fine with me,'' he said, ``except that I don't have much time left.'' His next project is to re-issue the steam-locomotive sound recordings that he was known for before his photos were discovered.
But for as long as it took him to arrive, for all the sidetracks of ill-health and a bad marriage, Winston Link seems satisfied with his legacy as it stands.
``It was tough,'' he said of those years around Southwest Virginia. ``I was strong and healthy and I was enjoying what I was doing. ... I was one man and I tackled a big railroad. I did the best I could.''
by CNB