Teddy is buried in my neighborhood, just down the bike path under the swings at McAdams Park.
But in the old photo, he’s still kicking, figuratively speaking.
A sturdy Shetland pony with yet another kid in his saddle, posing for the camera. This time, a little girl wearing a cowboy hat, a western scarf tied around her neck, waves in her hair.
Teddy looks fancy, too, with his shiny, spotted coat and his mane starched stiff.
The photo is black and white from the 1950s.
A few weeks ago that girl — Jan Conrad — posted it on a Facebook page that brokers in nostalgia.
“Remember the guy with the pony who went around Lincoln neighborhoods and took pictures?” the Lincoln woman wrote.
And 184 members of “You know you’re probably from Lincoln, Nebraska if ...” raised their cyberspace hands.
People are also reading…
Some of them had Kodak prints to prove it.
There’s Teddy on the screen over and over again, like a cardboard cutout horse, wearing the same patient expression on his pony face. The same Mohawk mane. The same breastcollar — decorated with hearts.
Some of the children wear the same cowboy hat Conrad wore, that scarf knotted around their necks, their feet bare and dirty, or clad in shiny saddle shoes. Nearly all of them smiling.
A few people even knew the man who took the pictures.
A photographer named Les McAdams, who owned a block of land near the railroad tracks and had a house at 43rd and Y streets.
An enterprising man who with his wife, Clara, peddled their pony business door-to-door.
It worked this way, says the couple’s youngest daughter, Suzi Tast:
Her dad would put Teddy — or his predecessor Neddy — in his trailer on summer days in the '50s and '60s.
He’d offer a free pony ride to kids out at play.
“He’d take them for a ride and then have them smile and take their picture,” says Tast, a retired Lincoln attorney. “Can you imagine that today?”
The photographer would then head to his home studio and darkroom and, photos in hand, return to knock on doors and offer them for sale.
“The pony rides were free,” his daughter said. “The pictures were not.”
Her dad made a living with his camera, taking school photos for Lincoln High and Northeast. Basketball teams and cheerleading squads and all those individual images of the sophomore and junior classes wearing cat-eye glasses and crew cuts.
He advertised his work in the Lincoln Journal Star. A dozen 8-by-10s and a wedding album for $49.50 in 1965; packets of senior pictures starting at $14.95.
McAdams bought his Shetland ponies at small-town horse auctions. He kept the docile animals in a dirt-floored barn on his land near the tracks before the neighborhood rose around them. A hay field to the east; sheep grazing on X Street.
“The whole field was brome grass,” Tast said. “There was plenty of water and they got oats once a day.”
For a few years, the quiet man — as gentle as his horses — hired a crew and trailered a pony and headed to Texas to take photos there.
And in the years after, he hefted his grandkids on a pony’s back for pictures closer to home.
“I remember how delicately Pappa would arrange us,” Cindi Randall said. “He was so kind and sweet when he took your picture.”
The father of three — Patty, Mike and Suzi — took photos for his church, Sacred Heart Catholic, and every family wedding for free.
Clara McAdams answered the phone and made appointments in the studio and carefully painted on pink cheeks and blue baby eyes in the early days of “color” photography.
Once, when Tast was in junior high, she accompanied her dad to University Place for a pony photo shoot.
They started walking Teddy through the neighborhood — Hey, kid, You want a free pony ride? — when a woman appeared, screaming at the photographer and his horse to get off the sidewalk.
“The police came down and said, ‘Do you have a peddler’s permit?’” Tast remembered. “He said he didn’t need one, and so they arrested him.”
Her brother arrived and helped her get the pony in the trailer and drove the station wagon home, and their Uncle Clem, who’d defended a guy named Charlie Starkweather a few years earlier, went downtown.
“And raised some hell,” Tast said.
The charges were dropped, the mugshot and fingerprints disappeared.
The pony man was 75 when he died in 1986, Teddy long-since buried under the dirt floor of the barn.
A few years after Clara McAdams died in 1998, Tast sold that land to the city and it became McAdams Park, tucked in next to the railroad tracks-turned-MoPac Trail, just south of Y Street.
McAdams’ grandson shared a piece of that story on the Facebook page that filled up with old photos of kids on a pony’s back last week.
He didn’t get it all right, Rick Tast said Friday.
He knew most of the pony story from other people’s memories, the 44-year-old said.
He mostly remembered the motorcycle shop his Pappa owned after he sold his cameras and flashbulbs. A retired professional photographer, hawking Husqvarnas and Hodakas at the Cycle Shack at 33rd and Madison.
“Those are my fondest memories of him,” the grandson said. “I have a lot of pictures of me on mini bikes.”