Master of the camera: Aldo Merusi captured bygone Rutland

For nearly a year, art aficionado and Rutland Herald staffer Richard Brown hunkered down, first at a desk in the newsroom then in a cubicle between the paper’s advertising department and newsroom, doing his own thing.

Reporters, editors and managers walked past him as he hovered over black-and-white photographs.

Brown almost never looked up to see who was passing and employees paid little mind. At some point, his job title changed from newsroom assistant to Merusi archivist.

Then, like a caterpillar creeping out of a cocoon, Brown emerged from behind his corner desk one day bearing boxes of black frames and carefully preserved, sharp images captured many years ago by a man with as much tenacity and passion for his work as Brown.

The former art gallery operator gently slipped his hands into white gloves. Now, he had their attention.

For the last month, in the confines of the Tuttle Building, the Herald’s historic former headquarters, Brown carefully and tirelessly dedicated his time to keeping the legacy of Rutland Herald photojournalist Aldo Merusi alive, by placing 150 of Merusi’s “beautifully balanced” images of the way Rutland used to be into individual displays.

The culmination of Brown’s work and Merusi’s life will be on display at 11 Center St. on Friday from 5 to 8 p.m. — an exhibit commemorating what would have been Merusi’s 100th birthday this year presented by the Herald, the Chaffee Art Center and the Rutland County Community Land Trust.

The exhibit will be up through the end of the year, open daily. A small permanent exhibition is on display in the Herald’s main entrance, viewable during regular business office hours.

Each photo is worth careful placement and careful preservation, because according to Brown, Merusi’s images — taken from 1937 through 1974 — chronicle the people, places, sights and sounds of Rutland and Vermont that are now nothing more than memories.

On Wednesday morning surrounded by the cherry red walls of the Tuttle Building, Brown was reminded of what he learned about a man he never met and why he was inspired to make sure Merusi’s work was remembered.

He sat in the middle of the room, flanked by black-and-white faces staring back at him — Robert Frost leaning on a railing glaring into the distance, an unknown masked skier in a gorilla suit sliding down the slopes during the Easter parade at Pico Mountain Resort, and former Vermont Gov. Joseph B. Johnson mirroring a ballerina sometime in the mid-1950s.

The focus of Brown’s job for the last year has been not to pay homage to a Herald photographer, journalist and self-described prankster, but to respect and preserve the news Merusi has gathered from behind a lens.

For Brown, and for many of Merusi’s friends and former co-workers, the photography exhibit means more than a thousand words — it’s a historical timeline and a community project.

“The primary focus needs to be identifying the people who are the subjects (of the images) before anyone who can possibly identify them is dead,” Brown said, moments before he began nailing images to the walls.

“It’s an important part of Vermont’s historical record,” he said.

That record is roughly 30,000 Merusi shots currently stored on 4- by 5-inch negatives in file cabinets at the Herald’s 27 Wales St. office.

It all began in the mid-1930s when Randolph’s Merusi was hired by the Rutland Herald as a newsman after graduating Boston University journalism school in 1935.

Six years later, Merusi was named state editor, a management position that had few boundaries — the reporter and editor continued to take photographs of breaking news, politicians and especially, children.

Children were at the end of Merusi’s lens many times throughout his career, a favored subject perhaps because he never had a son or daughter of his own, Brown said.

But youngsters weren’t the only thing that captured Merusi’s attention.

He snapped timeless images of Norman Rockwell, Bette Davis, Ronald Reagan and five other presidents.

Other photos gave Brown a sense of Merusi’s wit and “uncanny knack for getting the right moment.”

Merusi would be seen everywhere and he had the pictures to prove it, said 65-year-old Twig Canfield of Fair Haven.

Canfield knew Merusi through his father, a former newspaper owner who was the subject of one of Merusi’s photos when he was a Boy Scout.

“He sold my father a big camera and helped us set up a darkroom,” he said.

“Everybody who grew up in Rutland knew who he was … you wanted your photo taken by him.”

Canfield said it was fantastic to see one’s photo in the newspaper tagged with Merusi’s name because he won so many awards and was Rutland’s very own claim to fame.

“He was a master of that camera,” Canfield said.

But Merusi, who retired from the Herald in 1974 and died in 1980, hardly ever labeled the many shots he took during his four decades on the job, beyond a generic title. For Brown, the challenge of identifying Merusi photos has become his life’s work.

So far, he’s scanned about 10 percent of all of Merusi’s images and continues to ask the public’s help to identify them. A weekly feature on Friday in the Herald on People & Places offers up two photos in hopes someone recognizes their fellow Rutlanders.

The point of the exhibit, he said, was to expose all that’s left of some Rutland features and residents and the uniqueness of moments in time, captured by a man with a great eye behind a lens.

The images are “removed from our reality,” Brown said.

“They objectify a moment that you can’t get with a passing stare.”

Contact Cristina Kumka at cristina.kumka@rutlandherald.com.