NH Notebook: Kelly’s World

Sam Kelly Theodosopoulos spent a year curating a book of his grandfather’s historic photography.

For nearly a half-century, countless people, places and things in the Queen City caught Frank Kelly’s eye. 

With his wife, Eleanor, Kelly owned and operated a photo studio from their home on Belmont Street in Manchester, becoming known for his images of families, businesses — and brides.

“Without weddings, photographers would starve,” Kelly told the New Hampshire Union Leader in 1995.

A boy practices gymnastics in 1959 at the YMCA of Greater Manchester, now known as The Granite YMCA. Photo by Frank Kelly

The quote appears with a wedding photo that appears in “Manchester Through the Lens of Frank Kelly,” a collection of 150 examples of his work curated by his grandson, Sam Kelly Theodosopoulos, and the Manchester Historic Association.

The book grew from an exhibit at the Millyard Museum. About a decade ago, Eleanor Kelly began donating material to the museum, having kept meticulous records of his negatives. She had an ally in John Clayton, a former Union Leader reporter and columnist who was running the museum at the time. Clayton wrote the book’s foreword.

“He was kind of a family friend, a neighborhood guy,” Theodosopoulos says of Clayton. “He had written a couple articles about my grandfather back in the ’90s, and the Union Leader profiled (Kelly) a couple times. She reached out to him over the years and started donating boxes and boxes of negatives, a lot of which captured Manchester in the early ’50s and ’60s.”

Those images include scenes of downtown Manchester, local landmarks, everyday people and visiting political figures.

Theodosopoulos, who was a political science major at George Washington University, was particularly interested in the political photographs, some of which his grandmother collected for him as a Christmas present one year.

“It was really cool. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, MacArthur, Jackie O., Styles Bridges,” Theodosopoulos says. 

Vice President Richard Nixon, GOP nominee for president, greets Puritan co-owner Plato Canotas in 1960. Nixon lost to Robert F. Kennedy in the general election. He won the presidency in 1968. Photo by Frank Kelly

He reached out to the museum, which produced a small exhibit of Kelly’s political photos. That led to a more extensive exhibit from which the book gets its title.

“It was basically his life as well as all the images that he captured of the city and politicians, but also very personal too. They had his Marine Corps uniform on a mannequin,” Theodosopoulos says, noting that Kelly served in Iwo Jima during World War II in the Marine Corps 5th Division and was a witness to the raising of the American flag on Mount Suribachi.

The popularity of the exhibit inspired Theodosopoulos to reach out to Arcadia Publishing, which specialises in local history books. Once he got the green light, it took him about a year to complete the book.

“I ended up going through probably a thousand negatives and then sorted them by what I thought would be the best in terms of each category,” he says. “The museum did a great job of helping me with scanning them. In terms of research, my grandmother thankfully kept records and wrote the years down on the back of the sleeve of the paper for almost every negative.”

Elm Street landmarks in 1968 visible from this aerial view include Amoskeag Banks, City Hall, Ted Herbert’s Music Mart, Zayre and the Carpenter Hotel. Photo by Frank Kelly

A book launch at the museum in April attracted a hundred people — which Theodosopoulos credits in part to all those weddings his grandfather photographed.