Buzz King Recalls
Our Most Celebrated Chronicler ~by Jeff Tryon
B
ack in Frank Hohenberger’s day, before the advent of digital photography, there was a thing called a “latent image”—a photograph had already been recorded on film, but had not yet been made visible by processing the film with chemicals in a darkroom. In a way, Buzz King’s relationship with the famous Brown County photographer was like a latent image; at the time, as a child, he didn’t really see it. But in the intervening sixty or so years, his understanding and appreciation of the county’s most important chronicler has developed. King grew up on West Franklin Street in Nashville, and Hohenberger occupied rooms two blocks east at the Bartley House, where he lived the last 20 years of his life. As a child, he had been in Hohenberger’s darkroom, his workspace, but not regularly. King discovered at an early age that he shared a birthday, January 4, with the celebrated photographer and newspaper columnist. “He spent his birthday at our house every year until the year he died,” King said. “He was always down at Christmas, and on both occasions, he always brought me a gift. At Christmas, it was usually a book, wrapped up in brown manila-type paper. On birthdays, he always brought me a pack of 20 of the little boxes of Chicklets—that was his favorite.”
42 Our Brown County • Nov./Dec. 2020
Buzz King and Frank Hohenberger celebrating their birthdays together.
Hohenberger was working at a photography store in Indianapolis when he saw some pictures that someone had brought in to be developed and he asked, “Where is this?” He made several trips to Brown County, eventually moving here in 1917. Even though he travelled quite a bit and even tried living other places, he could never break away from his fascination with this place and its people. “He did more than any single person to make Brown County popular, throughout the whole nation, actually,” King said. “He wrote articles and his photos and pamphlets and papers—all kinds of good stuff. Photography wasn’t his only thing, he was a printer, too. He printed Christmas Cards for people every year, he printed little booklets. His press was small and printed things one at a time. He could print about a five-inch paper. For a couple of years, he published a little one-or-two-page thing called the Nashville Observer. Quite a few people subscribed to it.”
