By SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
sallies@juno.com

Oh, Beth, I hardly knew ye!

You've been here 16 years, but I wasted the first 13 of those, and now you're moving. Can't even remember when or how I met you.

Beth Snipes shot her first picture for The Citizen in December of 1995, so I guess we first saw each other at the weekly staff meeting. I knew only that she was The Photographer. There's no hard and fast rule about who takes the pictures in this newspaper you'll notice that the reporter who writes the story often takes his own but eventually, my editors got tired of the blurry film I'd turn in with stories and suggested we call Beth instead.

I was a bit intimidated, didn't know if I dared ask her to shoot pictures myself. When I finally got up the nerve, it was the beginning of one of the most precious relationships of my life. And the more I bossed her around, the more fun we had.

Beth grew up in Doylestown, Penn., a suburb of Philadelphia, a second-generation American on both sides her maternal grandparents immigrants from Poland, her paternal grandfather the only one of four brothers who left Ireland and came to the States. She took a degree in art at a small college in Erie, then decided she didn't want to teach.

She and John were married before she found her muse at a baseball game the Phillies won. She saw the photographers taking pictures and declared, "I want to do that!" John scraped together the money for her first camera and she went to the Philadelphia College of Art at night, passing off babies in the driveway when John came home from work. Starting as a stringer for a small paper, she worked her way up to full-time and began winning awards for her work.

She's amazing. I've seen her risk life and limb well, nice shoes, at least for pictures, like balancing on the slippery bank of a pond to get an interesting angle on a crane setting a bridge in place. She so charmed the pilots at Falcon Field that they regularly took her up for aerials. When she got a ride in a jet to preview an air show, she proved she can handle words as descriptively as film by writing a first-person narrative of the flight for The Citizen.

She comes by her artistic talent and love of photo-journalism honestly. The monumental force in her life was her father, Jerry Callahan, political cartoonist for the now-defunct Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. As a child, Beth would take his panels in to the paper all by herself, riding trains and buses, and felt so grown up.

Her dad, who died of cancer at 59, was a good friend of fellow cartoonist Bil Keane, whose "Family Circus" started in the Bulletin. Beth used to summer with the real Jeff and Dolly and P.J. and Billy. She doesn't think it odd that she also knows the guy who invented duct tape.

Hers is an eclectic circle.

I love her best for her wacky sense of humor, typified by the answer she gave when I asked her whom she would invite to dinner if she could have anyone, living or dead. "Dr. Seuss and Ogden Nash," she replied instantly.

We've been grieving the dissolution of our team, when it dawned on me that we've actually worked together only a half-dozen or so times our friendship has thrived through e-mail. And that will work as well between here and North Carolina as within Fayette County, Ga.

With John already at his new job and their daughters grown and gone, it has fallen to Beth to sell the house while she and son Johnny and Aunt Grace, 94, are still living in it.

She wrote: "Tuesday afternoon Election Day someone was coming to look at the house so I had to load Aunt Grace and the dogs in the car and make myself scarce. I was driving around when my car started making the oddest sound, like I had a flat tire or something was stuck under the car. I pulled into a driveway and found the tires were okay. I started driving again and the noise was louder.

"I was getting a big knot in my stomach worrying who I was going to call when the car died... I kept getting out to see if a stick or something was wedged underneath. As I got back in once again I glanced at the roof of my car, and lo and behold, my 'I voted' sticker was stuck there by an edge just flapping in the wind, making all that noise. The freedom to vote can be hard sometimes."

When I write her, I sometimes sign myself "Brenda Starr," or "BS," which is also her monogram, and not a very elegant one. Except, as I once wrote her, her real name must be Elizabeth. No, she replied, her mother had risked excommunication from the church to name her just plain Beth, and "BS" she is.

I asked her to shoot a couple of stories that required her to be on scene early in the morning. She wrote back and said, "No one can boss me around like you can and you probably won't get away with it with anyone else. Who else would shoot a 7 a.m. assignment, then lock her keys in the car with her equipment in the trunk? I had to call and wake John. Thank goodness he owed me one. He took it quite well."

The collaboration I loved best was the story I wrote about her accompanying a Baptist missionary team to Haiti. The pictures she brought back were tender, her effort extraordinary. Under horrendous conditions, she had to swap her usual slacks for skirts for cultural reasons: "We climbed a big mountain, and I'm carrying all this equipment, wearing new boots, in a skirt, and I kept falling down hills and tripping over logs. Many of the people who live at the top of the mountain haven't been down in 10 years because it's too hard to get back up."

She herself became a source of amusement and amazement to the Haitians and had to pretend she didn't notice them staring at her. She was deeply touched by their sweet affection toward a fair-haired stranger, and came home changed. "How hard their lives are, every day. It was easy for me to get through 10 days of no electricity or any conveniences. I didn't have to worry where my next meal was coming from, but so many Haitians do. It must be horrible to look at your child and not know how you'll feed him.

"I was afraid I would come home feeling very guilty about all I have. I don't. I'm very appreciative." She quips that it took her so long to feel comfortable here because she was a Yankee Catholic Democrat who asked for whole wheat bread before it was easy to find here in the South. Maybe that's why I love her: Used to be a Yankee myself, I like whole wheat, and I have Democratic leanings but I got the religion thing right. No priest ever challenged my first name.

Oh, BS, I'm kidding myself that e-mail will be the same. And whom will I boss around now? Don't go.

Love, Brenda

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