MICHELLE WILLARD, Post Staff Writer
Posted: Sunday, November 30, 2008 7:19 am

The Shacklett family (Tom and Gloria Christy and Bill Shacklett) keep a family tradition alive.

In 1935, Richard Shacklett decided he wanted to learn photography.

That desire to learn turned into Shacklett’s Photography, a fixture in the community since 1936. Now Shacklett’s son, Bill, and daughter, Gloria Christy, run the family owned business.

“He was self-taught to some extent,” Bill explained, adding his late father apprenticed with Murfreesboro’s Leo Ferrell, where Shacklett learned the tricks of the trade.

Within a year, Shacklett had ventured out on his own and started Shacklett’s Photography in the Polk Hotel in downtown Murfreesboro.

He practiced his art on the back roads of Rutherford County and on his classmates, since he was still in high school at the time. He took his own senior class pictures, which is something Bill does now for many of Rutherford County’s high school graduates.

Bill said that was the kind of man his father was. Once he decided to learn something, he set his mind to it and learned everything he could about it.

“He was a true renaissance man,” Bill said.

For example, Shacklett loved nature, and he learned everything he could about photography, so he could take pictures of what he saw.

“He loved nature,” his daughter Gloria Christy said. “So he photographed a lot of (it) and started documenting nature and wildlife and flowers.”

Bill said his father could identify birds by their calls and even a passing shadow on the ground.

Once Shacklett found a bird in his backyard that he couldn’t identify, Bill recalled. So he spent months wiring the backyard with microphones to record the bird and sent the recordings to Cornell University’s ornithology department.

“Whenever he got into it, he was like a dog on a bone,” Bill said, describing his father as a perfectionist.

It was Shacklett’s drive for perfection that led the studio to collecting historic photographs.

Bill said his father took up painting to become a better portrait photographer. He would take photographs and then paint them as portraits.

“He was a very gifted artist,” Bill said.

Eventually, people in the community began asking for copies of portrait photographs, and then they began to bring damaged and worn photographs in for repair.

“These were the days before Photoshop,” Bill said, explaining his father used his painting skills to touch up the old photos by hand.

“One thing led to another and people would start bringing us photographs from grandma’s estate …” Bill said. “We ended up having copies as people found them.”

The studio has also started transferring 8-mm film to DVD and, in the process its collection of historic videos is growing.

People from the community have brought in films of Central High School and video of Smyrna’s air show at Seward Air Force Base from the 1950s, Gloria said.

Then as other photographers retired or died, their photographs found there way into Shacklett’s studio.

When Murfreesboro photographer H.O. Todd died, his family gave all his negatives and pictures to Shacklett.

“This was the historic record of Murfreesboro from H.O. Todd’s perspective,” Bill said.

Todd’s collection covered the time when Shacklett served in World War II and lived in Twin Falls, Idaho, his wife’s hometown, from 1945-1955.

Saving the past for the future

Shacklett’s Photography has now partnered with MTSU and the Rutherford County Archives to try and preserve H.O. Todd’s photographs and other historic photos in its collection.

“It’s an ongoing thing we’re trying to do,” Gloria explained. “Now we’re saving individuals’ things and also documenting the community’s history.”

Director of MTSU’s public history program Brenden Martin said he came up with the idea to partner when working with Gloria last year on an exhibit at Oaklands Historic House Museum.

“Anybody that’s done any historic research in Rutherford County knows that the Shackletts have an incredible historic photo collection,” Martin said, adding they just lack the physical and computer space to properly inventory, catalogue and digitize the collection.

Martin solved the resource problem with the partnership, where the archives provides space, Shacklett’s provides the photographs and Martin provides the labor.

Rutherford County Archivist John Lodl said they hope to develop a model for public, business and community for preservation.

“This is a pilot project with Shacklett’s to figure out how to capture and preserve the historic community pictures of Murfreesboro,” Lodl said.

The partnership has an upside for the community as well, with Lodl hoping to make the photos accessible to the public, possibly through a Web site or exhibits.

“It is going to be much easier to find a photo from say the Civil War, or the 1890s or about women,” Martin said. “We’ll be able to pull it up and find it.”

So far Shacklett’s has allowed Martin and his graduate students to digitize 100 photographs at very high resolution. Martin plans to display the photos in Murfreesboro’s City Hall sometime early next year.

“We’re barely scratching the surface,” Martin said. “If Shacklett’s is happy with what we’ve done then we’ll continue the partnership.”

Michelle Willard can be contacted at 615-869-0816 or mwillard@murfreesboropost.com.