Brooklyn Card Shop Serves Up Historic Slices of Life

The camera lens froze them so long ago: mere moments in lengthy lives, captured and passed on to succeeding generations. Exuberant candids. Stern portraits. Contemplative great-aunts and crotchety great-uncles. All staring down across the decades, brown and brittle, for Damond Gallagher to ponder.

And ponder he has--in a most unusual way that the world can share.

In Scaredy Kat, the Brooklyn card shop run by Gallagher and his girlfriend, Nora Yockey, ancestors live again on elegant greeting cards reproduced by modern technology and ancient yearnings. The purpose: so anyone can wish anyone Happy Mother’s Day with, say, Grandma Joy Bell being held by her own mother in a gently fading 1920s image.

“I was just intrigued by these slices of life that were captured for an instant,” says Gallagher, 31. “You have this image. You blow it up, and you get closer and closer. You see their hands. And you bring them back to life.”

Adds Yockey: “You’re reintroducing yourself to your own past.”

They’re all here--Minnie, Jamie, Al, Lulu, Uncle Tabor, the poses you see when you pull out the attic shoebox or the back-of-the-drawer album. Some have the crimped edges of the 1950s. Others are sepia-toned and feel almost like starched clothing, exuding the stiffness of the late 19th century, when posing for photographs sometimes meant sitting still for a minute and more.

Last summer, while the two were busy opening their nascent card shop, Gallagher went home to Pueblo, Colo., and his mother pulled out a box of family photos. The idea, which had been percolating in the couple’s heads since they had started buying old photos of strangers from flea markets and estate sales, crystallized.

But both Gallagher and Yockey, who work in New York’s theater industry when they’re not purveying greeting cards, were fascinated by the power of the past long before that.

For Yockey, whose father is 77, the connection with yesterday is direct. While she was growing up in Illinois, her father would regale her with stories of the 1920s and 1930s. As a consequence, she says, she surrounds herself with old things and feels “more comfortable with the trappings of the pre-computer era.”

“I was born too late,” says Yockey, 31.

Gallagher, who because of divorces grew up with three sets of grandparents, sees the past through their eyes. Joy Bell Dederick, his grandmother, seems to have captured his imagination more than the rest. She stars in a number of cards, including a dramatic one from the 1950s that shows her dancing in a flamenco outfit.

The cards themselves, about $3.50 each, are made from thick Italian paper. Gallagher and Yockey scan each photo into their iMac and reproduce it at high resolution, then glue it onto the card.

Their method of choosing images is haphazard, by their own admission. They try not to select simply snapshots they like, but ones that seem to say something.

The most popular cards feature obscured faces or ethereal moments--a result, Gallagher suggests, of card buyers’ desire to superimpose their own stories rather than have the card deliver its message clearly.

“You project yourself onto the card,” Yockey says.

Though the cards aren’t marketed as “ancestor greetings,” the two offer the information freely when a customer selects one. Most people, Gallagher says, are fascinated--drawn in by the personal connection to the product.

And why not? Cards are supposed to be personal. Even the major manufacturers are producing popular lines that feature black-and-white photographs of people from eras long gone. Why should they all be generic? Why shouldn’t somebody’s great-grandmother attain card-shop renown?

Yockey certainly likes the idea. Though her family is more tentative, she says, about long-ago loved ones becoming card fodder, her parents are flattered by the idea. Odds are that Yockeys will eventually join Gallaghers on Scaredy Kat’s shelves.

“I’m planning to go home in August and spend some quality time with my parents and their boxes,” Yockey says. Her mother has started sending photocopies of favorite photos--a precursor to permission, Yockey hopes.

Then there are the friends, the acquaintances, even the strangers. “How about using my great-great-uncle on a card?” they’ll ask. Yockey and Gallagher try to be polite, and they don’t rule out using any image. But it’s hard to say no delicately to someone who’s proudly offering up forebears.

Yockey’s face grows serious for a moment as she pulls a photo album from under the counter. Inside, the life of a woman named Laura is documented.

Gallagher and Yockey bought the photos in a box at an estate sale. They lovingly reconstructed her life in rough chronological order. Here’s Laura, young and grinning, with her baby boy. Here’s the boy as a teen, as a young man, entering the military. Here’s Laura in middle age with her friends at a party. Here’s Laura--in the late 1960s, from the looks of it--her face weathered by years, but her vibrant grin intact.

Flea markets all over the country sell photos like this, family snapshots severed from families for reasons lost to history. Who was Laura? Gallagher and Yockey don’t know. But just as they try to save her memories from the trash can, they want to make certain such a fate never befalls their own families. So they work, hunched over the computer for six hours a day, to scan, reproduce and disseminate.

Sure, they’re trying to make money. But they’re also, quite consciously, battling impermanence: People long gone are being looked upon once more because of technology not widely available even a decade ago.

Maybe the men and women of these long-ago moments stood to be forgotten. Maybe not. But on the shelves of a little card shop in Brooklyn, N.Y., they have a chance to be seen again, to be thought of and noticed and discussed.

And who’s to say that’s not one little step toward immortality?