I was looking for more more info regarding Charley White, the "famous referee" whose burial site I spotted at Calvary last week, when I spotted a provocative headline in a 1917 issue of The Evening Independent, a newspaper from Jacksonville, Florida.
The headline announces "City of Marvelous Light May Soon Be Doomed to Darkness" but offers no detail to back this claim. Instead the headline is followed by a nightime photo of the Woolworth Building taken by one Philip Ossa, a photographer (according to the paper) who spent three months photographing New York at night.
If I read the accompanying paragraph correctly it may be that Mr. Ossa’s series of photos was called "City of Marvelous Light" and the headline might indicate that the exhibit was soon to close.
I found no reference on the public Internet to a photographer by the name of Philip Ossa, but (contrary to common assumption) being unindexed on the Internet does not indicate that a person or thing never existed, nor is it a signal one way or the other of said person or thing’s cultural significance. I will try for some real research tools at the library or other means. I do not know offhand how unusual night photography was in 1917 but if the pictures survive then I bet they are interesting.
That same paper did have an obit for Charley White, whose reputation seems to validate the "famous referee" headline on his tombstone. When I first spotted that phrase on his tombstone I was reminded of a recent book that covered umpires in Major League Baseball. In an interview the author of that book mentioned that even the most religious baseball fans would have trouble naming one single umpire from anywhere across the history of the game. I would think the same is true of any of the major U.S. sports. But Charley White was a boxing referee whose name appears to have been well-known among pugilists far and wide.
