When the Los Angeles wildfires broke out in January, I was back where I grew up, visiting my mother, who lives a few miles from where the first blazes erupted in Pacific Palisades.
Among my tasks was poring through the life’s work of my father, Morton Witz, an advertising photographer who had died a little over a decade earlier. My sister, Diane, and I had been putting this off for years, knowing it would be a monumental, and emotional, undertaking.
There were photos from jobs. Photos from vacations. Photos of Diane and me, going back almost to the moment we had been born.
As I began to dig through file boxes with my wife, I came across a collection of about 200 slides, in plastic sleeves, that had no connection with one another. They may have been the images he liked best. A shot of a Paris Metro platform, with passengers and a train in motion, in 1970. One of Diane and me, backlit by the sun, trying to catch fish along the Hay River in Canada’s Northwest Territories.
Then there was a photo from an N.F.L. game.
My father had done a handful of jobs over the years for N.F.L. Properties, the league’s merchandising subsidiary. In the image I discovered, the camera was aimed straight down the line of scrimmage. A referee was in the foreground as the Los Angeles Rams, in their crisp home whites, and the Detroit Lions, in their classic silver and blue, dug into the muck awaiting the snap of the ball. It was stamped December 1966.
I pulled out my phone, and snapped a photo.
As the fires spread over the next few days, I stayed in Los Angeles to help the National desk cover the damage.
I reported from a neighborhood in Pacific Palisades for one article, and then arranged to meet Susan Toler Carr and her husband, Darrell, for another. In 2013, they had lost their son, Justin, a young artist and athlete, who died from an undiagnosed heart condition. Now, the Carrs had lost their home in Altadena to the Eaton fire. They had rescued Justin’s artwork, but Darrell, who has taught photography to high school and community college students, lost his cameras, lenses and negatives in the flames.
We met at their friend’s home to talk.
To lighten the mood, I asked how the Carrs met. They told me about Susan’s father, Burl Toler, who died in 2009. He was the first Black secondary school principal in San Francisco, a police commissioner in the city, and the first Black field official in the N.F.L. He also helped officiate the 1980 Super Bowl, at the Rose Bowl, in Pasadena.
They wanted me to know about the size of his hands.
When Susan brought Darrell home to meet her parents, they told me, Mr. Toler’s hand wrapped around Darrell’s hand, his fingers reaching halfway to his elbow.
Justin so adored his grandfather that when he built a car for a soap box derby with his grandfather’s help, he painted a “37” on the hood — the number Mr. Toler wore as an N.F.L. official.
Susan showed me a photo of her father’s uniform, neatly folded and framed, and something clicked in my head.
I asked the Carrs for a moment, and scrolled through photos on my phone until I found the one my father had taken along the line of scrimmage years ago. In the image, the referee had one enormous hand on his left knee, his gaze fixed down the line, and a number on the back of his striped uniform: 37.
I showed it to Susan and Darrell.
We sat there, dumbfounded. As we continued to talk that afternoon, even while walking around the ruins of their home, we occasionally paused to marvel at the serendipity the photo represented.
I asked Susan a few days later what resonated with her about the image. “It was a flashback in time,” she said. “I looked at his arm — he was a thick, strong man who never had an ounce of fat on him. That’s why every picture tells a story.”
I had been thinking, too.
I had considered Darrell’s interpretation of a photograph as capturing a moment in time that no longer exists. In the moment my father had captured, just over 58 years ago, Burl Toler’s sights and my dad’s were in sync, one looking straight over the other’s shoulder.
It showed two men, who led their children by example, putting in a good day’s work.
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