Renaissance man
By Casey Gillis on Mar. 06, 2008
385-5525
Ask Jim Koger about former co-worker Jere Real and he’s full of adjectives: brilliant, eccentric, “a bonafide character.”
When Real was still working alongside Koger at Lynchburg College, Real was also something of a squirrel whisperer.
“He would carry nuts for the squirrels,” recalls Koger, a professor of English. “He would whistle, and this mob of squirrels would rush across campus. For awhile after he retired, when you walked out of Hopwood (Hall), the squirrels would surround you, hoping it was him.”
Real taught English and film at Lynchburg College for 30 years, starting in 1969.
It was one of many careers he has pursued in his 74 years. He’s also dabbled in reporting, photography and the record industry.
“He’s kind of a Renaissance man,” Koger says.
Real’s recent role as an exhibiting photographer came about purely by chance.
Last summer, he was cleaning out his garage when he found a manila envelope full of negatives. They were of photos he’d taken of interview subjects, famous people and other random things over the years.
As he went through the envelope, “anytime I found an interesting negative, I’d send it out to get printed,” Real says.
His latest show features photographs he took while on sabbatical from Lynchburg College in the 1980s. He went home to his native Mississippi to interview an author and heard about a boxing tournament that was going on.
“I knew the organizer, and he invited me to come and take some photos,” says Real. “I thought I could do a feature article on it.”
That never materialized, but he did end up with three or four rolls of film that he packed away and forgot about until last summer.
He has printed up about 20 of them, which will be on display all month at the CJMW architectural firm downtown. The space will be open from 5:30 to 8 p.m. Friday for First Fridays.
“I think they’re kind of interesting character studies,” Real says. “The fights weren’t that interesting, but the kids’ expressions are. (The photos) really capture the mood of the kids.”
They’re all in black and white, which Real prefers to color.
“It’s more dramatic, I think,” he says. “It’s the same reason I like black and white movies more than I like them in color. When you add color, it prettifies things. I just made up a word, but it prettifies things. Somehow, I think black and white captures the mood better.”Another exhibit of his work will go up at Lynchburg College in late August.
Photography is only one of Real’s many interests. He’s a painter who loves to paint city scenes and “whatever hits me at the moment,” he says.
He is also an avid collector who takes great pride in his various collections, all of which are displayed on bookshelves spread out in his three-story Rivermont Avenue home.
The kitchen houses a small collection of art deco and antique coffee pots. Downstairs shelves display hundreds of toy and model cars. He also owns about 90 1930s-era cocktail shakers, which are lined up neatly on another set of shelves, as well as an army of toy soldiers.
Upstairs, DVDs, VHS tapes and laserdiscs crowd the bookshelves in his TV room. He even has an entire bookshelf devoted to autographed books that he’d like to sell one day.
Antique cars are another passion. Real owns six, including a Corvette he bought when he first moved to Lynchburg.
“If they say a home reflects a person, mine does,” he says.
“I have a lot of stuff. … I’m a pack rat.”
All of his interests and exploits “just grew out of natural interest,” he says. “I just did what appealed to me at the moment, and still do. The good thing about retirement is you have time to do it.”
Real grew up in Jackson, Miss., and attended the Virginia Military Institute, where he edited the school paper and earned a degree in English. After graduating, he joined the U.S. Air Force and was put in charge of several base newspapers in Oregon and Washington. He also worked as an information officer.
Once discharged, Real went back and forth between reporting and pursuing a graduate education. In the 1960s, he worked as a reporter and feature writer for the Jackson Daily News and an editorial writer for the Richmond News Leader. Between newspaper jobs, Real earned a master’s in English from the University of Mississippi.
His first photography assignment came while at the Daily News. One day, all the other photographers were out on assignment, and his editor asked him to take some photos of comedian Danny Thomas. After a quick camera lesson with the darkroom manager, he was off. The photos ran on the front page, and after, Real would occasionally shoot for the paper.
“All of my jobs have always been flukes,” he says. “I wandered into the Jackson Daily News one day and got a job. I wrote a letter to the editor (of the News Leader) and got a job.”
His next one came the same way. When Real was packing up his office in Richmond, he saw an ad for a publicity executive job with a major record label.
“I didn’t know what company I was (applying) to,” he recalls. “(The address) was just a box number.”
It ended up being Mercury Records in Chicago. He got the job and started in 1966. In addition to working in the publicity department, Real also wrote liner notes for records, some of which he now displays in his home.
He left Mercury a year later and went back to grad school, eventually earning a master’s in drama from UVa.
Another move came in 1969, when Real came to teach English at Lynchburg College.
“He was a marvelous reader and talker,” Koger says. “He was just a lot of fun to listen to.”
Real soon carved a niche for himself as the college’s resident film expert and eventually began teaching film classes.
“He knew more about film than anybody I ever met,” Koger says. “That class was always full and overflowing. He’s very colorful, and students just enjoyed what he did. He also helped them understand film at a totally different level.”
Real says he was self-educated in film. As a kid, he’d go to the movies several times a week, often to double features. While at VMI, he frequented a movie house that showed foreign films and wrote movie reviews for the college newspaper.
“Movies just sort of combine all art forms,” he says. “You’ve got music, drama, acting. It’s the art form that brings all the others together.”
While at Lynchburg College, Real was also in charge of bringing speakers to the college and booked some impressive names over the years, including playwrights Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Larry McMurtry, reporter Cokie Roberts and authors Gore Vidal and Truman Capote.
Capote came to the college in 1976.
“He was a lot of fun, totally delightful,” Real says. “He kept you amused the whole time.”
When well-known people came to the college, Real would always take their pictures, and many of those black and white photos now adorn the walls of his living room.
“My house is like a rotating exhibit,” he says with a laugh.
“What’s really annoying to me now is that I didn’t take more pictures. You think back on all the chances you had that you could’ve taken a picture. You look back over the years … and you feel like an idiot.”
COMMENTS