Knowing Junnie Putman “brought out a side of me that was walled up my whole life,” says Richard Younker. Putman was one of the last commercial fishermen on the upper Mississippi River, and Younker, a photojournalist, visited him 55 times over nine years, photographing him with his fishing gear, listening to his stories, and mingling with his friends and family. Younker would pay room and board to the townspeople of Bellevue, Iowa, who’d put him up for days and weeks at a time in their homes. He came to consider Putman his best friend, and gave the eulogy at his funeral.
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Younker had worked as a teacher, a public aid caseworker, and a mailman before selling his first photographs in 1974. So maybe it was natural that his main subject matter was people at work. In 1988 he was photographing farm vets and “clam guys” when he came across a reference book at the library on Illinois occupations. It inspired him to visit the Mississippi River fishermen in Bellevue.
“She spoke the words that changed my whole life,” says Younker.
Like the time one of the clan challenged him to drink three inches of whiskey from a bottle in one gulp. He couldn’t. When another fisherman grabbed the bottle and downed it, Putman got pissed off that the whiskey was gone and he threw the empty bottle at the floor, where it shattered. Then he told Younker, “Rich, I want this to go in your book: Rich, I hung my uncle. I hung my own fucking uncle!” Putman went on to tell the story that one evening, after discovering his Uncle George had swindled him out of the profits of a catch, he’d hung him from a lamppost. But the lamppost bent, went Putman’s story, and George lived. Younker checked with a criminal defense lawyer before putting that story in the book.
“I said, ‘People are going to remember you for a long time through this book,’ and he said, ‘What good is it going to do me? I’ll be dead,’” says Younker. By then, Putman was riddled with cancer. “I said, ‘Junnie, most people live their whole lives to leave a legacy, and you’ll have one.’ And that seemed to give him consolation and solace.”
