Since 1960, this dad and his kids have been taking the same Father’s Day photo

For Father’s Days courting back to 1960, Seymour Levy and his two little ones have created a pilgrimage to the same place on the very same lawn of the same Woodmere Colonial. The Levys hold hands and pose for the very same photograph.

Dad in the center. Daughter on his proper. Son on his left. 

“You can see the way the young children grew up, and I form of grew down,” Levy, 91, suggests with a chuckle. “If you glimpse at the pics you recognize that every single year the youngsters get a tiny higher, a very little taller, and I remain the exact for a although. Possibly the previous two many years I dropped shorter.”

The pics are “a chronicle of our lives,” says daughter Danna Riback Levy, now of Manhattan’s Upper East Aspect — time period hairstyles, modifying fashions and the work of Father Time.

It can be a tradition, started out with a digital camera making use of black-and-white movie, and now ongoing in colour and with a digital Nikon D5200, that the trio will repeat Sunday — prior to chowing down on scorching dogs, chicken and burgers at a barbecue on the deck, with the rest of the relatives.

Seymour Levy, who retired in 2005 as a resourceful artwork director for the advert behemoth Ogilvy, by no means set out to consecrate a custom. It happened “just on a lark” a person day at his mother-in-law’s home in 1959 in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, when Danna was 2.

“It was a wonderful day,” he mentioned, “so I required to take a image with my darling daughter, so a photograph was taken. I do not even imagine it was Father’s Day.”

His spouse, Irene, snapped the photograph, a obligation she retained up for two a long time (with the baton passed to Jeff Riback, Danna’s partner, who Seymour mentioned likes pictures much more).

In 1960, Father’s Day arrived all-around, the few also had a son — Ron — and the loved ones experienced moved to the Woodmere house, ”and it occurred to me, I stated, ‘hey, I bear in mind using a photograph with my daughter it’s possible it’ll be a good notion if I get a photograph with both of those of them,’ so it happened.”

Fifteen or 20 photos are taken at a extend, and 1 is picked to stand for the yr. Seymour utilised to use negatives and slides and print 5x7s. Now, it is Adobe Photoshop and digital JPEG documents.

Whatsoever the medium, the images exhibit style alternatives. Some great. Some — very well, possibly there are some … regrets.

Searching a picture album Tuesday evening that Seymour experienced purchased on line from Apple, Danna mentioned: “I’m searching at the ebook suitable now, and I’m cringing. Yeah. Certainly. It is tough to think some of the alternatives I built.”

Ron, a pharmacist by trade who operates in oncology-concentrated biotechnology and now life in Rockville Centre, added: “I cringe in a superior way. It was all enjoyment.”

Seymour recalled: “In the early ’70s, I experienced an Afro. You can see in the pics I was a quote-unquote ‘hippy’ at the time. I experienced a genuine major Afro. That was sort of attention-grabbing to look at that — you know, the hairstyles and the outfits and the bell-base trousers at one time. Then, out of the blue, the clothing grew to become slim. It was also a vogue demonstrate at the exact time as a chronological record of our life.”

And the pics jog recollections not captured in the pictures.

Seymour appeared at the trio’s photo from 1971 and remembered how an across-the-avenue neighbor, who has due to the fact moved to Arizona, informed Seymour he’d look good in the Afro — and he tried out it out.

“In 1971, it started blooming,” he claimed.

For Ron, observing the photo from a bygone Father’s Day reminded him of a childhood pastime — going on a bike experience.

Seymour suggests that when the young ones had been more youthful, it took some nudging to get them to muster: “Right now, we appear ahead to it. In the extremely starting it was just about, I would not say chore, but to get them alongside one another —”

Danna, a freelance internet marketing consultant and writer, carefully interrupted. She doesn’t try to remember it that way.

“I under no circumstances noticed it as a chore, Dad.”

Seymour: “No?”

Ron: “No, fantastic tradition.”

Seymour. “That’s a excellent phrase. A ‘tradition’”

One more Rashomonic problem: What took place with the missing many years?

Did the relatives end using the pics from 1989 to 2007, starting up when the young ones went off to school and began family members of their individual, as Seymour explained in the beginning? (Photographs from 2011 to 2014 also are not about.) Was the pause substantially shorter, as Ron explained? Or, as Danna claimed, was there no pause at all?

Seymour: “I do not know why we stopped.”

Danna: “I really don’t know that we did, Dad. That is the factor —”

Seymour: “No, there was 20 a long time —”

Ron: “— 20 years looks a bit extended.”

Danna: “Those photographs have to be someplace, Dad.”

Seymour: “No, no, we stopped.”

Danna: “We did not miss out on 20 many years. There is absolutely no way. I really do not know what occurred to those.”

Ron: “Maybe five, six years, seven years — at the most.”

Danna: “I try to remember doing it every yr. I you should not even bear in mind a gap, truthfully.”

Ron: “The pictures are missing.”

Seymour: “That’s a thriller. That is a thriller of this whole thing.”

Ron: “You’ll have to go in and treasure-hunt to locate the missing photos.”

That night time, Seymour treasure-hunted and located the 2010 picture — a print nestled among a stack of papers in the desk of his household office.