There are times when the gods of silver speak, and the photographer must listen. When I discovered the Lehman station one hot, windy afternoon driving westward along U.S. 152, the site pulled at my guts and commanded my attention. The old crumbling building, with its weathered surface and peeling paint, had a texture I felt with my eyes and a history I heard with my soul. Later, when three separate attempts to photograph the station had failed miserably due to unlikely equipment malfunctions, I returned a fourth time and finally received the blessing of the silver gods.
On that fourth and most successful visit, I met Carl Le**an, the station's owner. A large, portly man with a shy and grounded nature, he told me about the history of the station and how it was depicted in the 1988 film, Rain Man. "They set up a scene with a phone booth, where Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise were in the booth together makin' a phone call," he told me.
I remembered the scene, and the phone booth had stood directly under the tall APCO sign. When I asked Carl what had happened to the phone booth, he reflected a moment and replied, "Oh, that was just a prop... they took it with 'em somewhere."
We continued to talk about the filming of the movie, and Carl told me how he had missed out on being an extra in the film. "Ol' Barry Levinson, he was the director. An' he told me he was gonna put me in a scene, but they never did git around to doin' that; it took 'em so long to shoot that scene in the phone booth, it kinda took their time up, I guess. Which, I didn't really care," he added laughing, "'cause I don't think I coulda hacked it!"
I thanked Carl for his time, and as I crawled into my truck to leave, he mentioned that he was glad he had resisted an earlier suggestion to tear down the station and sell the signs. For a brief moment, I imagined the nearly invisible town of Cogar with a bare, gravelly patch of ground, devoid of the fragile relic that was once the Lehman Station. I smiled and thanked him again, because I, too, was glad he had resisted that suggestion. As I drove away, I felt a deep sense of contentment, because I knew that Carl had also heard the voice of the silver gods, and had listened.
