For Father's Days dating back to 1960, Seymour Levy and his two kids have made a pilgrimage to the same spot on the same lawn of the same Woodmere Colonial. The Levys hold hands and pose for the same photograph.
Dad in the center. Daughter on his right. Son on his left.
"You can see the way the kids grew up, and I sort of grew down," Levy, 91, says with a chuckle. “If you look at the photos you notice that every year the kids get a little higher, a little taller, and I stay the same for a while. Maybe the last two years I dropped shorter.”
The photos are "a chronicle of our lives," says daughter Danna Riback Levy, now of Manhattan’s Upper East Side — period hairstyles, changing fashions and the work of Father Time.
It's a tradition, started with a camera using black-and-white film, and now continued in color and with a digital Nikon D5200, that the trio will repeat Sunday — before chowing down on hot dogs, chicken and burgers at a barbecue on the deck, with the rest of the family.
Seymour Levy, who retired in 2005 as a creative art director for the ad behemoth Ogilvy, never set out to consecrate a tradition. It happened "just on a lark" one day at his mother-in-law’s house in 1959 in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, when Danna was 2.
“It was a nice day," he said, "so I wanted to take a picture with my darling daughter, so a picture was taken. I don’t even think it was Father’s Day.”
His wife, Irene, snapped the photo, a duty she kept up for two decades (with the baton passed to Jeff Riback, Danna's husband, who Seymour said likes photography more).
In 1960, Father’s Day came around, the couple also had a son — Ron — and the family had moved to the Woodmere house, ”and it occurred to me, I said, ‘hey, I remember taking a picture with my daughter; maybe it’ll be a good idea if I take a picture with both of them,’ so it happened.”
Fifteen or 20 photos are taken at a stretch, and one is selected to represent the year. Seymour used to use negatives and slides and print 5x7s. Now, it’s Adobe Photoshop and digital JPEG files.
Whatever the medium, the photos show fashion choices. Some good. Some — well, maybe there are some … regrets.
Browsing a photo album Tuesday evening that Seymour had ordered online from Apple, Danna said: “I’m looking at the book right now, and I’m cringing. Yeah. Definitely. It’s hard to believe some of the choices I made.”
Ron, a pharmacist by trade who works in oncology-focused biotechnology and now lives in Rockville Centre, added: “I cringe in a good way. It was all fun.”
Danna Riback with her dad, Seymour Levy, and her brother, Ron Levy, in 1971. Credit: Seymour Levy
Seymour recalled: “In the early '70s, I had an Afro. You can see in the photos I was a quote-unquote ‘hippy’ at the time. I had a real big Afro. That was kind of interesting to watch that — you know, the hairstyles and the clothing and the bell-bottom trousers at one time. Then, suddenly, the clothing became narrow. It was also a fashion show at the same time as a chronological history of our lives.”
And the photos jog memories not captured in the photography.
Seymour looked at the trio's photo from 1971 and remembered how an across-the-street neighbor, who has since moved to Arizona, told Seymour he’d look good in the Afro — and he tried it out.
“In 1971, it started blooming,” he said.
For Ron, seeing the photo from a bygone Father’s Day reminded him of a childhood pastime — going on a bike ride.
Seymour says that when the kids were younger, it took some nudging to get them to muster: “Right now, we look forward to it. In the very beginning it was almost, I wouldn’t say chore, but to get them together —”
Danna, a freelance marketing consultant and writer, gently interrupted. She doesn’t remember it that way.
“I never saw it as a chore, Dad.”
Seymour: “No?”
Ron: “No, great tradition.”
Seymour. “That’s a good word. A ‘tradition’"
Another Rashomonic question: What happened with the missing years?
Did the family stop taking the pictures from 1989 to 2007, starting when the kids went off to college and started families of their own, as Seymour said initially? (Pictures from 2011 to 2014 also aren't around.) Was the pause much shorter, as Ron said? Or, as Danna said, was there no pause at all?
Danna Riback with her dad, Seymour Levy, and her brother, Ron Levy, in 1987. Credit: Seymour Levy
Seymour: “I don’t know why we stopped.”
Danna: “I don’t know that we did, Dad. That’s the thing —”
Seymour: “No, there was 20 years —”
Ron: “— 20 years seems a bit long.”
Danna: “Those pictures have to be somewhere, Dad.”
Seymour: “No, no, we stopped.”
Danna: “We didn’t miss 20 years. There’s absolutely no way. I don’t know what happened to those.”
Ron: “Maybe five, six years, seven years — at the most.”
Danna: “I remember doing it every year. I don't even remember a gap, honestly.”
Ron: “The pictures are missing.”
Seymour: “That’s a mystery. That’s a mystery of this whole thing.”
Ron: “You’ll have to go in and treasure-hunt to find the missing pictures.”
That night, Seymour treasure-hunted and found the 2010 photo — a print nestled between a stack of papers in the desk of his home office.
Danna Riback with her dad, Seymour Levy, and her brother, Ron Levy, in 2010. Seymour Levy of Woodmere has taken the same photo in the same spot with his children for 60-some years. Credit: Seymour Levy
Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.
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