The Agrinautica

   This past May 14th, I turned 43, and my grandfather died at 98.



   He was born in 1927 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where his parents had immigrated from Germany in 1913. He grew up speaking Portuguese and German fluently as native languages and also taught himself English and Spanish. Here are his own autobiographical words:

   "Coming from a comfortable middle class family in pre-World War I East Prussia, my father took mother and his 7-year old son Karl (who became Carlos in Brasil) from a previous marriage to a drastically different, significantly less civilized environment in southern Brasil, where she worked very hard and endured much stress and many indignities while they operated a small hotel in the wild west atmosphere of Passo Fundo, Nonohay and Carazinho, where people carried guns, exactly like we see in our movie westerns.
In southern Brasil (in the state of Rio Grande do Sul), Father worked as a surveyor and eventually they moved to Rio, where he worked at the German-language newspaper (Deutsche Rio-Zeitung) and where I was born. I remember occasionally visiting him in his office. Increasingly intense wartime anti-German passions caused us enormous difficulties, including the closing of my school two years before I would have finished, so that I never graduated from high school. Innocent German citizens were imprisoned on Ilha das Flores (Island of Flowers), exactly like innocent Japanese and Japanese-American citizens were interned in camps in the U.S. during WW II. German ships that happened to be in the harbor were confiscated and Rio’s German Hospital became the Brazilian Air Force Hospital.
Our home in Santa Teresa was invaded and plundered by mobs [because we were German]. I managed to jump down a back wall and run to a small store to phone my brother who called the police, who came and simply stood by the gates to our house, doing nothing to prevent the plundering!
   Father could not find a job, so Mother had to work as a nanny for wealthy countess Modesto Leal, who had three daughters and a spoiled son. Coming home at night, she brought us left-over food from her place of work, such were our circumstances! My brother Carlos had been the personnel manager at a Brasilian airline ("Condor”), but when WW II broke out, he was fired. Carlos then eked out a living by peddling esoteric pharmaceutical drugs. I was fond of my 22 years older (!) half-brother, who was always kind and caring to me."

   And the following is from the start of a clearly autobiographical book he started but sadly didn’t get very far on:

   "In the late forties, Ipanema beach was very uncrowded and considered to be far removed from bustling downtown Rio de Janeiro. If you went there today, you would be hard pressed to imagine that Ipanema was once a quiet, moderately affluent residential suburb of Rio. But this story begins in the idyllic days of that beach, when a colorful group of Friends in their early twenties met at a certain spot on weekends to talk about girls, cars, sports (which usually meant soccer), hiking, hobbies, to play beach volleyball and yes, to take an occasional swim. The group was quite diverse: [various character descriptions illustrating the great ethnic and cultural diversity of the time and place], and myself, born and raised in Rio of German parents. Of course we would ogle the lissome girls in their miniscule tangas and try to engage them in conversation. The girls would congregate in their own groups, and we were forever trying to promote mergers... There were wonderous stories of romantic conquests, many of them probably brazenly embellished. It was a welcome relief after the war years, which had split up friendships among youngsters like myself of a naive, impressionable age.
   The propaganda from both the warring sides was so intense that we often did not know what to believe, until the facts became increasingly clear. l am embarrassed to admit that at war’s end l was ashamed of my parents for the sole reason that they were German, and the Germans had committed the unspeakable atrocities of the holocaust. For a time l didn’t speak to my parents, even though they had done absolutely nothing wrong, quite the contrary – we had a Jewish family living with us as paying guests.
   Eventually it dawned on me that a Zebra cannot wish its stripes away, it will always remain a Zebra, and I, like it or not, l will always remain of German descent, so I should try to make the best of it, to atone, in my individual way, for the sins of my blood brothers. This background partly explains my fascination with the Leica, which I came to regard as a dignified symbol of German craft. It helped me to balance the unconditionally bad image that l had acquired of everything German. Not only the smooth precision of the Leica itself, but especially the extraordinary people behind it – and this is what much of this story is about."

   Rolf bought his first Leica camera on Monday, February 21st, 1949, from the Leica distributor in his home city of Rio de Janeiro. He paid for it in 12 installments. Leica features prominently enough in his life that we need to make a quick detour into photographic history:

   In 1925 the Leica* company invented the first successful production 35mm camera. Or to be very specific, Leica engineer Oskar Barnack did. Rolf denies my father Oscar is named after him but I'm not sure we believe this denial. The ease of use and portability of the Leica camera revolutionized photojournalism, street photography and recreational photography. That famous photo of the Hindenburg burning up? That was taken on a Leica. On any account, Leica, a German company, not only represented some of finest engineering facilitating the burgeoning new art of photography, they also stood out as an example of Germans with ethics: in what has become known as the “Leica Freedom Train” the Leica company hired as many Jewish employees as they could and sent them to the United States to get them out of Germany. To quote wikipedia:

Employees, retailers, family members, even friends of family members were "assigned" to Leitz sales offices in France, Britain, Hong Kong and the United States. Leitz's activities intensified after the Kristallnacht of November 1938, during which synagogues and Jewish shops were burned across Germany.
   German "employees" disembarking from the ocean liner Bremen at a New York pier went to Leitz's Manhattan office, where they were helped to find jobs. Each new arrival was given a Leica camera. The refugees were paid a stipend until they could find work. Out of this migration came designers, repair technicians, salespeople, marketers and writers for the photographic press. The "Leica Freedom Train" was at its height in 1938 and early 1939, delivering groups of refugees to New York every few weeks until the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, when Germany closed its borders.

   Or to quote his own words again: “I came to the realization that this collection of fine, precise, beautiful instruments constitutes a symbol for me, a symbol that represents my German heritage by means of something good, something that is extremely well made, something that is associated with many wonderful human beings who I feel highly privileged to have met. These symbols counterbalance the heavy burden of guilt that I and many like me perceive as having to bear for being of the same heritage as those who committed unspeakable acts during World War II, acts of which we are constantly reminded and subliminally made to feel responsible for by the media, even though I was far away from those tragic events, having been born and raised in Brasil, never having left that country until many years later. That is why I cling to that symbol of good German craftsmanship, which, coupled with a culture rich in scientists, poets, composers, painters, explorers and philosophers, gives me the inner strength to sustain the faith in my heritage in the face of such powerful deterrents!”
(*technically Leitz Camera Company, but to keep it simple I'm calling them Leica throughout this)

   In probably 1947 (ie when he was 20) he met 34 year old Sheila Tobin at a double blind date where they had each been set up with someone else. Sheila’s father Patrick "Tinc" Tobin had immigrated to Brazil from Ireland (to work on the railroad) and her mother, Elisa Lins Caldas, was of a family whose history in Brazil goes back beyond records.. A cousin’s description of Sheila’s father at this time is “a lovely tall, kind gentle person, I would say a lonely man” [He and Elisa had separated]. Rolf and Sheila were married the next year in 1948. Sheila’s birthday was May 14th, which is my birthday and of course the day Rolf died (on what would have been her 112th birthday)
   Brazil has mandatory military service, which initially he loathed, but then he got transferred to translating English manuals which he actually kind of enjoyed..
   He was then working in a telephone factory when his father-in-law (my great grandfather Patrick Tobin) encouraged him to apply to an American university and then helped him afford the ticket to come to the United States on a student visa to study electrical engineering at Purdue University. It was a 12 day passage on the steamship SS Argentina – arriving in New York in mid winter (Jan 21st, 1952) must have been a severe shock to someone from tropical Brazil. Already of meagre resources and with the exchange rate being very bad he arrived in the states very much with the proverbial “$5 in his pocket.” To pay for university he got another factory job and eventually got a Fulbright scholarship. Just a few months later, in April of that year, Sheila followed with their 16 month year old son Oscar on a Pan Am turboprop DC-6 with a layover in Trinidad. Because this was a more civilized age, the airline issued my dad and his mom both elegant certificates on behalf of “Jupiter Rex” for having crossed the equator - dad’s is framed on the wall above his desk to this day. (I don't have at hand a picture of dad's but here's someone elses)

   Newly immigrated into the States he faced discrimination both for being Brazilian and for being German. And again there was that shame for what Germany had done, but, already a fan of photography in general, the Leica company stood out to him as representing everything good about Germany that he could be proud of (as mentioned above). So he drove fifteen hours from Purdue University in Indiana to visit a Leica factory near Toronto and ask if he could possibly have a tour. The factory director and head of Leica Canada, Günther Leitz, was so impressed he'd driven all that way that he gave him the tour and insisted he stay at his house before driving back. Already a fan of the company and product, he felt like this was the first time anyone had been kind to him since coming to the United States.

   In 1955 he began working at Kodak as an electrical engineer: “A manager came out to the motel where we were staying after we first arrived in Rochester in my ‘42 Dodge and gave me money to pay for food and rent for my family! When I was unhappy with my first job as a development engineer, the company had a program in which you spent two months in each of the major divisions of the company, and you had the opportunity of picking the one that you liked.
   Even though I was an engineer, I liked the lively and creative environment of the International Advertising Division so much that I took a chance of leaving my engineering training behind for the exciting travel and creative field involved in that division.”
He excelled in the marketing division due to his gregarious extroverted nature, language abilities, and genuine passion for cameras and photography.
   He settled with his family in Rochester, upstate NY, where during Kodak's height most of the big buildings in town seemed to belong to Kodak. He was proud to work for Kodak during its golden years. Unfortunately Kodak bet wrong on digital cameras, shelving their early prototypes as they'd challenge their film sales, and when I visited Rochester in 2023 it was a town full of boarded up former Kodak buildings.
   But on any account he lived the whole rest of his life (other than frequent travels) in the house in the beautiful foresty suburb of Irondequoit there where my dad and his brothers grew up.

   His wife my grandmother (“Daddysmum”) unfortunately died of breast cancer in 1990 and I regret that I barely knew her, as I was then only 8 and had only traveled to see them in New York a few times. Fortunately I got to spend more time with “Dad-dad,” especially in 1997 when I lived with him in Ireland for awhile. I remember him for being deeply knowledgeable about all things camera, very friendly with everyone, and inclined to sometimes be downright goofy.

   Meanwhile back in camera news, the Leica company went bankrupt or nearly so at some point, due possibly also to the change in the market brought on by digital cameras, and sold off any historical cameras they had. Later, reconstituted under new ownership (no longer the Leitz family) the company wanted to have a museum at their HQ and began to look around, and who happened to have one of the biggest and best collections of Leicas of note? My grandfather who had been collecting them all these years for mere love of them. That famous photo of the Hindenburg burning up? He had that camera. I don't mean the same model, I mean that camera. So now there's a Fricke Collection at the Leica Museum. Curious for an outside perspective I asked ChatGPT about the Fricke Collection and it says thus:

Yes, the Leica Museum at Leitz Park in Wetzlar, Germany, features items from the renowned Rolf Fricke Collection. Rolf Fricke, a Brazilian collector of German origin and a founding member of the Leica Historical Society of America (LHSA), amassed an extensive collection of Leica cameras and related equipment. His collection is considered one of the most significant private Leica collections ever assembled.
   The museum showcases a range of rare and historically significant Leica items from Fricke's collection, including early prototypes like the UR-Leica, design studies, and limited-edition models. These exhibits provide visitors with a comprehensive look into Leica's rich history and technological advancements

   (Regarding this collection, from an email from him to a Leica executive: “I would like you to understand that my collection is a powerful symbol to me, not a frivolity nor a materialistic investment. As a matter of fact, one could say that, in terms of money, it is worth zero to me, because I cannot bear to sell it, as it has so many priceless human connections.”)

   Most recently, when I visited in 2023 he was still living alone and driving himself around (at 96!). We went to one of his favorite restaurants, Monte Alban Mexican Grill, where the whole staff, all from various South American countries, greeted him with genuine enthusiasm – I don’t mean the formulaic greetings every customer receives, I mean they cheerfully exclaimed across the room at the sight of him, greeted him with the kisses-on-both-cheeks, fawned over him like he was their own dear abuelo, waitresses assigned to the other end of the restaurant came by to say hi, a waitress who was already off duty and in her street clothes came to greet him, the manager came out from back. He exchanged witty repartee with them all and harmless charming flirtations with the senoritas.
   I thoroughly enjoyed this last visit. As I wrote at the time: “My grandfather got up to bid us goodbye [at 5:30am!] and was surprisingly wakeful and bright eyed and bushy tailed. While saying goodbye I was acutely aware that he being 96 this could very well, odds probably more than likely, that it might be the last time I see him alive.” Which it turned out to be.
   And so his story of a lifetime pursuing his noble passion of cameras and of enriching the lives of everyone he came in contact with comes to its conclusion.

   He is survived by his three sons, seven grandsons, six great grandchilden, and his lasting contributions to photographic history.


I swear he didn't usually have that mustache.


This, like the above picture, is not taken at a museum, but his house! Busts of important people in camera history: (from front to back) Oskar Barnack, inventor of the Leica camera; Ernst Leitz I, who gave the fledgling microscope manufacturing company his name; his son Ernst Leitz II; who made the risky decision in 1924 to place the then very unconventional Leica camera in production at a time of serious economic depression; his son Ernst Leitz III, on whose watch the company went broke. (And in the flesh, my illustrious grandfather)

   Saturday was Sashie (slosha)'s birthday party. She reasoned that the cops were gonna break up the party after 11 anyway, so they might as well get as much partying in before that as possible - so the party officially started at 5pm.

   But first, Saturday morning, Sashie and her boyfriend Nizzle made a sumptuous breakfast of eggs and bacon for several of us.
   Kritsy and I got to the party at around 6 I think but there was already a nice little party underway. Originally they had around 180 jello shots made (and they mix them so that they're like a shot per jello shot), and a cooler of jungle juice¹ (along with some other beer). When I arrived a guy with no shirt who goes by "smilie" was distributing jello shots. I had about six in the first five minutes, and I think he must have had like nine or ten. He was also pushing what he called a "slimey carbomb" (jello shot in beer), and then invented the "slimey jungle" (jello shot in jungle juice). I found both of these rather tedious - the point of a jello shot is it doesn't involve drinking isn't it?
   Anyway the party was pretty excellent. Lots of people showed up, even Azver eventually. I commandeered one of the disposable cameras for awhile and took some pictures, notably I documented Rennie seducing Little Colleen.

   Eventually as the night wore on, people started scampering off to safeway for food and returning - the convenience of living right next to safe-way.

¹I don't know how universal the term is but jungle juice = strong alcohol (in this case vodka) in juice.


Quote of the Day: "Kris and Aaron aren't similar - they're the SAME person" -Olivia. Incidentally upon meeting Aaron, Adrian described him as "Kris and Azver's lovechild."


Dad-dad - from the mail-bag!
   Got an email from my paternal grandfather, "Dad-dad" (it all started when while my brothers and are were still very wee, my paternal grandmother asked us to call her "Daddy's Mum." Daddysmum spread to Dad-dad and Mum-mum, but didn't effect my maternal grandfather, who is called by everyone, his own children included, "Roger"). I always find is emails interesting. Here is an excerpt:

I just returned from Germany, where I attended a humungous photographic trade show called "photokina" and where there was a formal press reception to announce a large bi-lingual book entitled "50 Years Leica M", for which I had provided the English translation under horrific time pressure.