Napoleon Lajoie photo by Louis Van Oeyen

[prewarsports]

People forget the Great Van Oeyen was just a diminutive little guy with a floppy hat and glasses who worked at a newspaper, no different really than a copy-editor or obituary writer at the time. The vast majority of his work (and I mean at LEAST 90%++) was never credited and a lot of the NEA sports stuff after WWI through the 1930's was taken by him. Every now and then you see something with his name on it, but from 1918-1930's and beyond, he was just a salaried employee in Cleveland living in a small house, and working in a small office, taking daily assignments to take pictures of... whatever the newspaper wanted him to do. Most of the images taken by him were developed by other guys at the newspaper and identified by others off his negatives. Only the early stuff and a small vein in the 1920's and 1930's actually bears his handwriting on the back for the most part. It is sad that these guys were forgotten for so long, but researching them and their photography now 100 years later is almost impossible. Even the library that has his "collection" knows next to nothing about his life and photography.