My Father, Lt Col George L Newton, lived a full life. He was 87 when he died, and saw as much as a working-class kid from Rochester, NY could see with his own eyes–as a pilot stationed all over the world–first with the US Air Force, and then as a commercial pilot. But this shot is about my Mom, Earlene Merkel Newton, his wife of sixty-seven years. She’s also seen it all. She’s the survivor of survivors–the eldest of 12 siblings herself, some of whom have passed on, and now as the widow of the warrior. The iconic, archetypical image, unposed and real, is as personally profound an image as I’ve ever been behind the camera to take….mainly because that’s my Mom and that’s the flag that draped my Dad’s coffin .
