A random stock photo brings memories of a mother who died too young

One Sunday last month, Mary Meekins was sitting at home in Herndon, Va., looking through The Washington Post when she found her mother looking back at her.

“It's like the last thing you expect to see in the paper,” Mary said. “I immediately took a snapshot on my phone and sent it to my relatives.”

Mary’s mother, Elizabeth “Betty” Tuthill, died of cancer in 1959, when Mary was 13. For Mary, getting a glimpse of her mother from before she was even born was magical.

The black-and-white photo accompanied Becca Rothfeld’s review of “After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time,” by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek. It shows a woman sitting on a stoop, a bucket, broom and dust brush next to her. An apron covers her dress.

Book World’s photo editor, Annaliese Nurnberg, found the image after searching the word “housewife” in a vintage stock photo collection. Said Annaliese, “I don’t know if this is accurate to how she was feeling, but I saw a woman who was tired of the monotony that comes with cooking and cleaning every day. To me it looked like she was wondering if there was more to life than work.”

Mary had known that before her mother married her father — when she was Betty Kniskern — she had been a professional model. Betty had even posed for the cover of McCall’s magazine, in a portrait painted by pioneering female illustrator Neysa McMein.

Originally from Upstate New York, Betty had lived in New York City and Atlanta. In February 1938, the Atlanta Journal ran a story on Georgia women who were active in Manhattan’s modeling scene. Betty Kniskern was among them.

“Standing 5 feet, 10 inches, she is preferred for lingerie, corset and fashion advertisements,” the paper wrote. “Although weighing 148 pounds, her firmness of muscle, lack of excess fat, and erect carriage place her much in demand.”

This particular photo was probably taken in May of 1940. We know that because the company that took it has maintained very good records on the half-million images in its collection. H. Armstrong Roberts founded the stock photo agency bearing his name in 1920 in Philadelphia. Today it’s run by his grandson, H. Armstrong Roberts III. He’s 80 and everyone calls him Bob.

“We have a reasonable claim to being the originators of what we would like to call commercial stock photography,” Bob said.

Bob’s grandfather started not as a photographer, but as a writer, selling his work to pulp magazines. Roberts realized that as advances in printing allowed magazines and newspapers to move from using line drawings to using halftone photographs, they would be hungry for photos to illustrate stories. He devised lists of images — businessmen at desks, mothers holding babies, families picnicking — and set about creating them.

“My grandmother, when she took the trolley going in and out of town, used to carry cards in her pocket book,” Bob said. “If she saw someone who looked photogenic, she’d offer a card.”

The card invited the person to visit the Roberts studio at 42nd and Locust streets — the company is still headquartered there — for a photo shoot.

“We were registering models and babies and kids and people who thought they were possibly photogenic,” Bob said. “And some were.”

The woman in this photo was a professional. Bob said the company’s records indicate she came in five times. But the name she put on the model releases wasn’t Betty Kniskern or Betty Tuthill. It was Ann Alexander.

Mary Meekins told me she had never heard that name.

“Maybe she was advised to use another name for modeling purposes,” she said. “That picture sure looks like her. Everybody in the family who knew her said that’s her. Either it’s a double or she used another name. It’s another wrinkle.”

I asked Mary what she remembered about her mother.

“She was just a wonderful mom,” she said. “She called me her little shadow. I would follow her everywhere.”

Betty was a Sunday school teacher and a Girl Scout troop leader. She cooked and did housework and raised Mary and her two brothers. It was the 1950s. Her life was probably more like the woman in the photo than that of a Manhattan model.

After the book review came out, Mary went out to lunch with some friends and took along a copy of The Post.

“Look what I’ve got here,” she said. “That’s my mother.”

I asked Mary if the photo made her at all sad. Not at all.

“I think after all these years I’ve come to be settled with the fact that she died young. It wasn’t sad. It was just amazing to see a part of her life I’d never known.”