Hovdey: Don Krone was more than these 1,000 words

It doesn’t matter what you’ve heard. There is no good way to say goodbye.

Kurt Vonnegut called it the “emptiest and yet the fullest of all human messages,” and like everything else he said, he was right. In its smallest moments, “goodbye” feels like a selfish wave of dismissal. Next case. At its most consequential, “goodbye” is a surrender to an inevitability no one wants to contemplate.

Our family said goodbye to Don Krone, father of Julie Krone, just before midnight on the Fourth of July. He was home, here in California, with his daughter by his side. He was about two months shy of 83, after a full life made miserable near the end by the disease named for the 19th century British apothecary James Parkinson. So goodbye to that.

To describe Don Krone and his daughter as joined at the soul is not an understatement. If Julie got her horse-wise talents from her mother, she got the rest from her dad, a self-taught Renaissance man who could be described at any particular time as aircraft mechanic, school teacher, craftsman, artist, or antiquarian, depending on what he had going that day.

Above all, Donald Rhine Krone was a master of photographic art. His vast portfolio of images features breathtaking desert vistas, slyly observed character studies, experimental montages. He was a student of the photographic greats – Manuel Bravo, Eugene Smith, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson – but like all accomplished artists he set his own standards, and he exercised his art to please himself. The Don Krones hanging on our walls attest to nothing less.

Not surprisingly, he saved his best work for Julie Krone. Few Hall of Fame athletes have had their formative years more vividly captured. These are not family snapshots. They are historical documents of time, place, and personality, from the quiet moments in the arms of her mother, Judi, to her farm-girl antics in rural Michigan, to her earliest acrobatics on horseback, her father’s fine eye was there to capture the countless moments that shaped the life of the professional jockey waiting to emerge.

If there is a best picture among the many, this vote goes to the little girl and her Shetland pony Dixie, side by side and about the same height, their flaxen hair and mane tangled and backlit in the low northern light.

“One more,” Don said to his model. “Look sleepy.”

“But Dad,” Julie complained. “I’m not sleepy.”

During his long, creative arc, Don never traveled a hundred feet without one of his dozens of hard-working cameras, one of his classic Leicas or Hasselblads, or an old-school Olympus SLR. His favorite at the end was the Nikon D90, but when it became too heavy for his increasingly unsteady hands he switched to a lighter Lumix and cranked up the speed, then passed on the Nikon to a grateful son-in-law.

I first met Don Krone in August 2000 upon the occasion of Julie’s induction into the Thoroughbred racing Hall of Fame in Saratoga Springs. Don was giving his daughter a piggyback ride down Union Avenue on the way to the ceremony. That was the way they rolled.

Don traveled far and wide with Julie for riding appearances. He was there with his camera to record her exploits in Hong Kong and Tokyo, Kentucky and New York, and at her home base of New Jersey. He was her travel pal, her rock in hard times, her personal Michelin Guide. Once, lost in New York, she called him at home in Michigan for directions. Before there was GPS, there was DRK.

Don Krone lived long enough to receive a visit last week from his best friend, Roger Engle, and Roger’s wife, Mary. They made the drive from central Texas to San Diego in about a day and a half. Roger met Don at a photography class Don taught back in Michigan, long ago, and found a kindred spirit despite their 16-year difference in age.

“Don taught me a lot,” Roger said. “And not just about photography.”

The first time Don Krone left Michigan he was fleeing home with a couple of pals in an old beater of a Chevy that limped all the way to California before they were taken into custody as juveniles on the run. He was sent back, then returned three years later with the Air Force.

The last time Don left Michigan was a year ago, when Parkinson’s was taking a toll and living through another raw winter was too awful to bear. So he traded the eastern shores of Lake Michigan for sunsets over the Pacific, which became the final images on his camera card.

“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome,” wrote Isaac Asimov.

No argument there. But if it’s all the same, we’ll try to forget the troublesome transition and keep the rest in our hearts. The remains of Don Krone, father of Julie and Donnie, grandfather to Lorelei and Daniel, will be interred at the Miramar National Cemetery in San Diego, befitting the veteran he was. And after the echoes of the salute fade and his daughter is presented the folded flag, someone will read this from Saul Bellow:

“The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures do stop.”