Lake Effect News

By Kate Sosin

Correspondent 

He never married or had girlfriends.  His modest smile and charming way of engaging those around him wasn’t used to win hearts.  It is said that he had a high school sweetie  but she broke his heart, and he never loved again.  But everyone knows he found true love at age 9 when his father handed him a camera.  

Marty Schmidt as a young army photographer. Before he became the "eyes" of Rogers Park shooting thousands of neighborhood pictures for the Rogers Park/West Ridge Historical Society, Schmidt photographed such historic figures as Winston Churchill, and King George VI and Queen Elizabeth during World War II.

Martin J. Schmidt passed away last week, on Sunday, May 17, two days after his 88th birthday.  He lived in Rogers Park and left behind hundreds of thousands of photographs. 

“Uncle Marty,” as he was affectionately known by all around him, grew up in North Center, Chicago.  The oldest of three boys, Schmidt adopted his father’s photography habit in grade school when he played a photographer in a school play.

“I think as soon as he picked up his camera, he knew,” his niece, Patricia Schmidt said. “He was in love.”

Schmidt pursued photography with tunneled fixation.  As a high student, he snapped so many photos for the yearbook and school paper, that he was offered a full scholarship to DePaul University.  Because photography classes weren’t offered, he studied chemistry, hoping it would improve his developing.

But Schmidt never graduated.  He was eager to get out into the world.  World War II had carried his brother oversees, and he wanted to enlist as a photographer. In the Army, he fought to prove himself despite his lack of professional training.  When a recruiter finally saw his portfolio in 1940, he sent Schmidt to Long Island, NY, to study photography.  A few months later, he found himself in London.  He photographed the “Blitz,” Winston Churchill, and King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. He left for France when it fell to the Nazis and documented the lives of women there.

By the end of war, Schmidt was homesick.  He returned to Rogers Park and fast found a career in industrial photography.  He traveled throughout the U.S. and Canada, always returning to Rogers Park, always photographing history as he saw it occurring everyday.  He studied with Ansel Adams in the 1950s, participated in various camera clubs, and in 1961 earned himself the title of “Master Photographer” with the Professional Photographers of America. 

But it was the history of Rogers Park that captivated him.  He walked the neighborhood ceaselessly, photographing his every journey.  Schmidt’s reputation preceded him, and everyone lovingly called him “Uncle Marty.”  He took pictures of his nieces and nephews and their children.  He made binders of pictures for their teachers, and recorded every school event he could. 

As Schmidt was painting Rogers Park into roll after roll of film, one Rogers Park woman was begging her neighbors, “do you have any photographs?”  That woman was Mary Jo Doyle.  She and Schmidt were the likeliest of best friends.

“Mary had a vision,” Patricia Schmidt recalled.  “When she met Marty, he fit right into that vision.

Doyle found Schmidt behind the lens of a camera on one of his many walks through Rogers Park.  The two shared a love of the neighborhood and its history.  With neighbors, they founded the Rogers Park/West Ridge Historical Society.

“It seemed like he would always show up with a camera around his neck,” Kathie Paluch, a founding member of the Historical Society, recalled.  “So many of the historical photos tracing the changes in our neighborhood from then until now are Marty Schmidt shots.” 

Marty Schmidt, wearing his Esienhower jacket, at the World War II "Two Soldiers" exhibit in May 2007 at Lakeshore Health and Rehabillitation Center in Rogers Park. Sitting to his right is his brother, Joseph Schmidt.

According to Patricia Schmidt, those shots consumed him.  Schmidt took so many pictures of Rogers Park that his collection of prints nearly devoured his Morse Street apartment.

But the pictures stopped coming in November of 2007 when Mary Jo Doyle passed away from complications related to cancer. He and Doyle had retired to Lakeshore Health and Rehabilitation Center on Sheridan Road together.  They had been bickering on and off for years.  Schmidt had photographed her countless times.  He was decades her senior, but their friendship had so easily transcended those 20 years. 

“When Mary Jo died, he lost a bit of the sparkle,” Patricia Schmidt said. 

Schmidt’s cameras began to collect dust and his famous grin softened.  He still attended family gatherings, his wit never slowed, but something had been distinctly misplaced. 

Schmidt was fighting a blood infection, diabetes, and recovering from a partial leg amputation at St. Francis Hospital in Evanston when he passed away.

Patricia Schmidt doesn’t know whereabouts of her uncle’s last camera.  It might be somewhere in the boxes of thousands of pictures her family has yet to sort through.  And then it might not be.  Wherever the camera rests, all who knew him likely expect it could only be found in one place: hanging around the neck of Uncle Marty.