An actor's final encore
During his award-winning acting career, Ed Asner became famous for playing crusty yet lovable characters, with the most famous being Lou Grant — the newsroom boss in two popular TV series, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” from 1970 to 1977 and an eponymous spinoff from 1977 to 1982. Asner also provided the voice for the curmudgeonly Carl Fredricksen in Pixar's 2009 animated film, “Up,” that included a poignant scene about photography's power to rekindle memories.
After Asner died in 2021, a similar scene became real. His son, Matt, found hundreds of undeveloped negatives. He decided to get them digitized along with a storehouse of printed pictures.
“I honestly didn't know what I was going to get back,” Matt Asner says. “It's kind of overwhelming. It's like you get this treasure back that opens your eyes to a past that you sort of remember. But a lot of it you don't remember.”
Looking at his dad's photos rekindled memories that Matt didn't realize had been buried in his subconscious. One day, Matt was gazing at some photos taken of him when he was 3 or 4 years old at a Southern California beach house that his father would rent for the family during the summer. One picture in particular opened the floodgates.
“There's this picture of me holding a dead fish, and I had this wild memory of finding it on the beach and keeping it with me for four days,” the son recalls. “My mom finally threw it away when I was sleeping because it was stinking so much. That was a very strong memory that I had forgot.”
The digital conversions of Ed Asner's old pictures also produced troves of other visual baubles, including one of the actor as a young man gazing introspectively at himself in a mirror — perhaps as he prepared for a role. Matt now shares some of his favorite pictures of his father on his Twitter account, but what he likes best is sending them around to relatives — something the digital format makes easy.
“Some of these pictures haven't been seen for 40, 50 or even 60 years,” Matt Asner marvels. “It's like opening up a strange world for everyone and it draws you closer as a family. My dad and mom were sort of the glue for the whole family. Now, these photos replace some of the glue that has gone away.”
While she loves looking back at all the good times with all the friends she made, some of her favorite images are our her late parents.
“It brings back so much happiness, but sometimes sadness,” Paquette, 67, says. “I can see now: I have had a very, very rich life.”