Background on Alton H. Blackington
Blackington photographing Isaac Marcosson, 1936
The photojournalist, writer, and radio celebrity Alton Hall Blackington, known to his friends as "Blackie," was a beloved interpreter of New England culture, covering news and personalities with the flair of a story-teller. The son of quarryman Fuller Cook Blackington and his wife Ida B. (Smith), Blackington was born on November 25, 1893, and raised in Rockland, a town on the central coast of Maine. Educated through high school, he enlisted as a yeoman in the Naval Reserve in April 1918, spending his sixteen months in service as the official photographer of the First Naval District in Boston, a fortunate break for his future career.
Parlaying the skills he acquired in the military and drawing upon an extraordinary combination of ingenuity, self-promotion, and ambition, Blackington built a remarkable career. Upon leaving the service in 1919, he crossed the city to secure a position as staff photographer with the Boston Herald. During ten years there, he built a popular following for his personal photographic style, and especially for his quirky choice of subject matter. The quality of his work and his experiments in color photography earned him the distinction of being named a Master Craftsman by the Society of Arts in Crafts in 1925.
From early in his career, Blackington did more than simply cover local news and the arrivals and departures of celebrities and politicians, he began to capture the range of distinctive personalities that he saw as definitive of New England character. His photographic vision extended to include hermits and eccentrics, skilled craftspeople, and the living relics of old traditions, including lighthouse keepers, whalers, and the last living town crier.
While expanding his range as a photographer, Blackington also branched into a startling range of creative pursuits. Always entrepreneurial, he established the Blackington Photographic Service during the 1920s to distribute photographic content to news outlets and advertisers, handling not only his own work, but the work of other photographers. He also began to draw on his literary talents, writing for the news, and in keeping with a separate interest, serving as editor for Fire Fighting, the magazine of the New England Association of Fire Chiefs.
Perhaps most famously, Blackington became to build a following as a lecturer by the late 1920s, giving illustrated talks that famously combined color images with colorful tales. His earliest lectures were often based on stories of his life as a press photographer, the "romance" of the press, and his intimate knowledge of the news business, as well as current events, natural disasters, adventure travel, and an eclectic array of other topics. He soon became better known, however, for his stories of New England "characters" and his sometimes folksy and eccentric tales of New England life.
Blackington's popularity on the lecture circuit attracted the notice of WNAC and WEAN radio, which offered him a weekly show in 1933. "Yankee Yarns" became the center of his fame and his bread and butter for over two decades. With his subtle Down East accent lending credibility, and a casual air and ear for a good tale, Blackington became known as "an authority on little-known New England stories," as a WNAC promotional blurb put it in 1937. A critical and popular success, Yankee Yarns was awarded a Peabody Award in 1948 and scripts for the shows were in such high demand that Blackington edited several to produce two books, Yankee Yarns (1954) and More Yankee Yarns (1956).
Blackington was married twice, first to Marion Tresel Pyne in about 1922, with whom he had one son, and second, in 1939, to Alice Powers. A longtime resident of Lynn, Mass., and a member of the Lynn Post 291 of the American Legion, Blackington moved to nearby Beverly Farms in about 1952. He continued to work in radio for into the mid-1950s and as a writer for several more years. He died in April 1963 and is buried in Pine Grove Cemetery in Rockland, Maine.
