I had tried, and failed, to find the boy in the photo. Instead, he found me.
Mark Kozlak recognized himself in a 64-year-old photo published in the Star Tribune in June. He's standing in the snow next to Janet Lee Dahl, the Minneapolis girl pictured in a discarded photo album that was rediscovered at a flea market in Southern California.
Janet died at age 10 in 1959, but her childhood was preserved in 200 photos that her mother, Gertrude, took and carefully annotated. Sometime after her mother's death in 1997, the album was sold to a collector of vintage photos and reprinted in a book of found images. That prompted me to investigate her brief but remarkable life, and how those photos express something universal about love and loss.
I was frustrated, though, that I couldn't figure out anything about Mark, who's identified on a few of the images only by his first name.
Then, among the dozens of messages from readers I received after the story was published, came the voice mail. "I'm the Mark in the picture."
A week later, I was sitting across from him at his usual table at Jax Cafe, the northeast Minneapolis restaurant that his father and uncle turned into an institution. Kozlak's cousin now runs the place. Kozlak, who went into real estate, is 68 years old and lives in Osceola, Wis. He also mentioned he's fighting cancer.
He brought his own albums to share. The pictures and stories of Janet Lee Dahl had transported him to his childhood, when he, his sister, Janet and an army of other neighborhood kids held parades up and down the sidewalks of Wilson Street, wearing hats fashioned out of newspaper by Janet's mother.
He also remembered Janet falling down, though he wasn't aware of her seizure disorder that contributed to her final, fatal fall.
