When Kathleen Metcalfe went looking for her own family’s history, she ended up finding a lost piece of Juneau’s: boxes and boxes of slide film taken by her uncle Bob Prather, hundreds of images chronicling Juneau life from the 1950s until his death in 1982.
“My thoughts were I might find photos of my own family when we were younger,” said Kathleen. “And I ended up just finding tons of really cool photos that he had taken over the years.”
Her uncle had worked as an accountant and auditor with the Territory and then the State of Alaska, “and I think, I’m only guessing,” Kathleen said, “He would go walking on his lunch hour and so there’s all sorts of downtown scenes of Juneau.”
They are scenes both familiar and strange. A 1951 shot of Front Street is easily recognizable, even if the movie playing at the theatre may have been forgotten, but no trace remains of Juneau Cold Storage where Bob captured images of workers processing halibut in 1957. The State Office Building he captures in one undated photo bears no resemblance to the one we have now. Coastal-Ellis Airlines no longer graces the waterfront. The old Douglas Bridge has been replaced.
And it’s not just downtown. In the 1970s, the Prathers moved to Thunderbird Terrace in the Mendenhall Valley and Bob began to capture Valley life, especially the airport and the massive hulk of the Mendenhall Glacier.
Bob was an avid hiker and shots of Salmon Creek Trail, Perseverance Trail, East and West Glacier Trails, the dike trail and many more are included in his collection — often with his family, wife Kay (McAlister) Prather, son Jeff Prather and daughter Susie (Prather) Kollar at the center of them.
More than anything else, Bob took photos of his family. Some are posed, some are candid. There are photos of his son on hunting trips, his wife and daughter at the store, and of them gathered with extended family and friends at parties and picnics.
“I learned a lot about my mom and dad that I never knew” from the photos, said Susie Kollar. “I learned that my mom had fabulous style. She was always dressed so cute and always in something different in every photo. She had the stylish shoes, outfit, coat, purse and hat.”
“His pictures told a lot of stories,” she said and her cousin agrees.
“Bob was a very quiet guy and, through his pictures, gave a window into who he was as a man. He loved his family and his town,” Kathleen said.
Born in 1918, Bob Prather was originally from St. Louis, Missouri where he graduated from Brentwood High School in 1936. He served in the Army and National Guard from 1935 to 1938 and seems to have joined again when World War II started, coming to Juneau with around 5,000 other soldiers during its time as a subport of embarkation.
In Juneau, he met the McAlister sisters including Kay, who he would marry on Sept. 15, 1945, and Pat, who married Vern Metcalfe and had nine children, including Kathleen, Kim and Mac. The Metcalfes and the Prathers would share a home on Gold Street for many years, with the smaller Prather family taking the upstairs apartment.
Bob lived in Juneau for the rest of his life. He and Kay have two grandchildren, Carlie Kathleen Kollar, 18 and attending college at Washington State University and Kieran Liem Kollar, a sophomore at Thunder Mountain High School.
Within the family, Bob’s photography was no secret.
“He was one of the few men that I knew at that time that had a serious hobby, and his was photography,” said Mac. “He constantly took pictures of family, sites in Juneau, buildings, just life in general.”
“Every memory I have of my uncle, he had a camera in his hands,” Kathleen said.
And he had a darkroom at the Gold Street home where he would develop his own photos.
“My dad would spend hours in his dark room and bathroom developing black and white,” recalls Susie. “(We) would have photos hanging in the bathroom and in his dark room.”
Mac recalls that Bob’s house was full of photography books and magazines.
“I remember when I returned from Vietnam in 1969, I had purchased a Japanese camera,” he said. “Bob recognized early the value of the Japanese cameras and lenses compared to the German, which were the standard measure of quality in the 50’s and 60’s, and had already purchased Japanese lenses himself.”
According to Kathleen, Bob kept many types of cameras, including a Rolleiflex, Nikons and Polaroids.
“He had a lot of cameras which he was very interested in; the camera itself in addition to taking pictures,” Susie said.
And then there are the slides Kathleen found, neatly kept with the dates and people identified.
“Bob was an accountant and he brought that kind of ordered thinking to his photography,” said Kim. “He was meticulous and his work shows that. Unlike many casual photographers, he labeled photos, locations, and kept slides and negatives stored properly.”
While this labeling system increases the photos historic value now, there’s little doubt of their artistic value.
“Bob really captured Juneau,” Kathleen said. “I can look at them all day.”
It’s a sentiment shared by those outside the family, including professional photographer Brian Wallace (see page 17) who came across the photos on Facebook after Kathleen began scanning Bob’s vast collection to share with her scattered relatives.
“Something caught my eye,” he said. “It was (a photo of) the construction of the old museum building, the one that was recently replaced. It brought back a whole bunch of memories. I was real young at the time, but my dad was on the site council and we walked by it, it seemed like every few days ,just to see. Every time we were going downtown we walked past it, every time we would walk to my grandma’s house we’d walk past it.”
Wallace kept watching as more and more photos were shared on Facebook and his opinion of the photographer increased.
“Just an amazing street photographer,” he commented. “I wish I would have shot more like that” during his own career.
“It reminds me of that great street photographer Vivian Maier,” he said. “Absolutely no one knew what an amazing photographer she was” until her photos were auctioned off after she died and later published to great acclaim.
“I imagine his family knew what a great photographer he was but now it’s being shared. The entire town is totally grateful, especially us old timers.”
Susie recalls operating the slide projector during slideshows of her father’s work when she was a child: “We did this many times, sometimes while cousins were there and sometimes just our family.”
Bob’s photos were only shown publicly once when he was alive, by Dr. Henry Akayima on the cardiology floor at Bartlett Regional Hospital.
“I am sure Dr. Akayima had to talk him into this,” Susie said.
As for displaying his photos in the future, that will be up to the family to decide given the personal nature of many of the images but it’s hard to see the photos without forming an opinion on the matter.
“I think his work deserves to be seen,” said Wallace. “(It) just can’t be kept to a select few.”
Water skiing by Juneau’s downtown waterfront in 1955. The old Douglas Bridge can be seen in the background.
Front Street, downtown Juneau in 1951.
State office building, no date.
