Closing of a sharp eye: R.I.P. former News photographer & videographer George Breithaupt

I was sad to hear of the passing of one of my favorite Knox County personalities this week.

Photographer, writer, and all-around character George L. Breithaupt, Jr., died last weekend at the age of 78, according to his brother David.

I got to know George during my spell working at the Mount Vernon News in the late aughts, when George also worked at the paper in the online video department, while also serving as backup photographer to long-time staffer Virgil Shipley.

I soon realized that George was fun to chat with because of his dry wit and his endless supply of interesting stories.

When I moved down to the area at the same time he was looking for a roommate with which to share a place, George and I ended up sharing a house in Gambier, on Duff Street.

I warned him I’d be moving in a lot of books and music, but he was fine with that. I mentioned along the way that I also had a spinet piano, not as huge as an upright, but still very hefty.

He said to bring it on, so I told him I would, but it would depend on my friend Dan Feiertag’s schedule as to when we could move it.

One night after work, Dan was available, so we decided that we’d better go ahead and move the beast while the weather was good. With much effort and cussing, we hoisted the piano into the back of the Chevy pickup truck I then drove and strapped it down.

By the time we got to Gambier, it was well after dark, but we were committed to finishing the move.

I backed the truck up to the porch of the house, and with a great deal more effort and even more cussing, Dan and I got the intractable piano across the porch and into the house, making enough of a God-awful din to raise the dead.

I thought for sure George would have heard us wrestling that piano into the house and swearing like sailors as we did so. Turns out, George was quite able to sleep through anything, because he only discovered that we now had a piano in the house when he ran his shin smack into it around 3 a.m. later that night, when he got up to use the restroom.

I didn’t worry too much about being noisy after that.

One time, George came down to listen to the sounds I was making because I was playing a recording from my huge classical music collection. George’s own preference was jazz, but he had great respect for the classics.

One evening, I turned around to find George standing at the bottom of the stairs from his room, his eyes brimming with tears.

“The Firebird Suite,” George said softly.

I was a little surprised he knew the Stravinsky piece, because he’d never said anything specific about classical music before. Plus, his response was intense, tearing up like that.

But he explained to me that he knew that piece of music well because of hearing it as a child.

I’m trying to remember what exactly it was he said: If I recall correctly, he said his grandfather had played the music for him from an old 78-rpm record when he was a child, and the music was seared into his memory. Whenever he heard it, nostalgia for his childhood flooded him.

I didn’t realize until I saw his obituary that George was originally born in North Carolina, while his father was attending Duke law school. But they soon returned here, where the family certainly had deep Knox County roots.

He told me some of his favorite memories were growing up in the countryside south of Mount Vernon.

Once when we were out on an assignment for the newspaper, he pointed out the road where his family had lived, Pleasant Valley Road, off Ohio 36. His brother David confirmed this, and added that even back then, George was making 16-millimeter films and writing a comic book series.

“He wrote a super hero series called Super Duper Clod for which we made pies and threw them at each other,” David said. “George was of course, Super Duper Clod.”

George’s fascination with cameras had blossomed after he was given a Kodak Brownie camera at age 12, and it was a camera he kept his whole life, like all his cameras. I teased him once and asked him if he had a Kodak Disc camera (remember those cheap things from the early ‘80s?) in his collection.

He disdainfully replied, “Even I have some standards.”

His interest in photography kept growing through his teenage years, until he ended up going to New York City to study photography.

He remained there after graduating from the Germain School of Photography, delighting in taking photographs of New York in the 1970s and 80s, while becoming accomplished at developing photos to make a living between photo-taking gigs.

George told me that one of his regular customers at the film lab was legendary American poet Allen Ginsburg, who had a side hobby of taking photos.

George developed many of the great man’s photos, which included shots of numerous famous Beat Poets and other literary legends.

George shared many of his NYC photos with me. He had been particularly upset by Sept. 11, 2001.

At this late juncture, I can’t remember exactly when he said that he had returned to Knox County, a move necessitated by the end of print photography, as digital technology wiped out his way of making a living.

Perhaps others here can help me with that. But even if he had left the Big Apple, part of his heart remained there, and the 2001 terrorist attacks broke his heart.

He showed me a shot where he caught the setting sun framed by the twin towers of the World Trade Center as if they were megaliths at Stonehenge.

It was a part of the city skyline that he never dreamed would one day collapse in devastation.

Many local residents will remember George’s newspaper column ‘The Grumpy Bachelor.’ It had already ended before I came to town, but George shared some of the columns with me.

My favorite was the one where he gave a bachelor’s instructions on how to clean a dirty refrigerator full of mysterious fuzzy items by throwing in a lit stick of dynamite, slamming the door, and running like hell.

The column led to George often being called “Grump” by Knox County commissioner Alan Stockberger, among others.

George’s sense of humor was delightful. Once, as we were working away one winter afternoon in the newsroom, elderly photographer Virgil Shipley could be heard in the photo studio having a loud and violent coughing fit that caused everyone in the newsroom to look up.

In the silence that followed this veritable thunderstorm of hacking, George’s quiet voice could be heard piping up from the back of the room: “Am I now the Mount Vernon News photographer?”

Of course, it wasn’t to be: Virgil worked for a decade beyond that date, even past when George himself was forced to retire for reasons of declining health.

But the jokes kept coming: In 2014, he took a photograph of a Conestoga wagon in the Knox County Agricultural Museum and labeled it “Virgil Shipley’s First Car.”

I also vividly remember that George saved my neck one time. Then — as now — I had a bit of a habit of not just burning the candle at both ends, but more like chopping up the candle into several pieces and lighting all the ends on fire.

(How else do you think I manage to work three jobs and still write books and do talks on top of that?)

One day in the newsroom, I was typing up coverage of something less than absolutely thrilling, and was having trouble keeping my eyes open. Eventually, I nodded off completely.

I was startled awake by hearing George’s gravelly voice about one millimeter away from my ear, saying, “If Kay and Liz [the publisher and her assistant] catch you sleeping at your desk, you’re toast.”

Fortunately, he pulled me back to consciousness, and I didn’t get fired that day.

I regret that with the schedule I keep, I didn’t get back to visit George very often since I left the News in 2010. But one time when I did visit, George snapped a picture of me laughing, which has remained one of my favorite shots that anyone has taken of me.

George was an outstanding photographer, with a real eye for arresting images, and an artist’s eye for manipulating those images through digital processing. I loved seeing the various shots George shared on social media over the years.

To honor his life, what we really need to do is organize some kind of exhibition of his pictures. It is the only tribute that would feel right, though to properly salute him, we’d have to crack some jokes and tell some stories along the way.

So, farewell, old friend. You were one of the good ones, and my life — and many others’ were richer for having known you.

Donations in George Breithaupt’s memory may be made to the Knox County Humane Society Cat Shelter, 400 Columbus Road, Mount Vernon, Ohio, 43050.