BAR HARBOR, Maine — A lot of the things popular on the Internet are like soap bubbles: shiny and insubstantial, disappearing as fast as they float past on your Facebook feed.
But when Joshua Alsup decided to tell the story of his father, Bar Harbor blacksmith Steve Alsup, in words and images he shared in an online photo album this summer, this is not what happened.
So far, more than 10,000 people have scrolled through the comprehensive collection of captioned photographs — 163 altogether — that trace the steps of the elder Alsup’s life, from his birth in 1944 in Missouri to his death at home in Bar Harbor this January, in the house he and his wife built by hand.
There are glimpses of camping trips, of the beautifully crafted wrought-iron railings he made and of Alsup as a young, clean-cut soldier, a wild-haired hippie, a smiling father and a white-haired man who faced the camera with an unflinching stare. It’s a portrait of a man’s life that’s as solid and real as his ironwork.
“ I suddenly feel deeply humbled,” one commenter on the website Reddit wrote after scrolling through the album. “We’re all just humans, trying to live our lives to their fullest.”
“I’m sitting in the middle of a bar in Manhattan, crying like a baby,” another wrote.
The response surprised Joshua Alsup, a 34-year-old bike messenger dispatcher who lives in Philadelphia. He decided to create the tribute after his family threw a memorial party for his dad in May. It was there he saw three chronologically organized photo albums put together by his mother, Bar Harbor weaver Judith Blank.
“I hadn’t seen a lot of those pictures,” Joshua Alsup explained in a telephone interview. He figured his dad’s life story might be interesting, primarily to young blacksmiths.
“I just thought it would be neat for somebody who was young to see what that was like, seeing how somebody lived their life as a blacksmith,” he said. “It’s pretty rare.”
But it turns out that his father’s life resonates for many others, too. In a world where so much shared on the Internet is fleeting, the story of Maine blacksmith Steve Alsup has caused deeper reflection among those scrolling through his life on their handheld devices.
“What a lovely post,” one reader wrote. “I have a 4-month-old daughter and couldn’t help but think about how my current life wouldn’t lead to anything as moving as this. I don’t think pictures of me staring at my phone would be so interesting for her or others 40 years from now. [Joshua’s] dad lived a good life of doing. I need to get off my damn phone and get out into the world.”
Always a surprise
Steve Alsup was born a world away from today’s technological interconnectedness. He grew up roaming the woods and Ozark mountains of southern Missouri, just 20 miles from the Mississippi River.
After high school, the wide-eyed teen joined the Air Force and was a radio operator in Turkey and Germany. He married and had a daughter, but the marriage ended and Steve Alsup wound up back in Missouri, going to college on the G.I. Bill. It was the beginning of the 1970s. The photos show how he started to let his hair grow and how his clothes became more fanciful. Then they show a beautiful woman with dark hair, who came onto the scene and stay there. That woman was Judith Blank, a young teaching assistant from Pittsburgh with a newly minted Ph.D. in anthropology.
“Steve was always a surprise,” Judith Blank said this week. “It seemed like he was an original — an authentically honest person. He didn’t bother about what other people thought about it.”
The couple turned their gaze to the north, first moving to Massachusetts, where she taught at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester. He found work as a “colonial townsfolk” in Old Sturbridge Village. It was at that New England living history museum where Steve quickly lost interest in farming, then discovered a love for blacksmithing. In 1977, the couple moved to Maine.
When Joshua Alsup was born, his parents were working on their octagonal house. Capped with a cupola and built with lumber salvaged from the big hotels that had burned in the fire of ’47, the house has “a good feeling to it,” Judith said. Steve started his blacksmith business, the Morning Glory Forge, and spent lots of time in his shop producing the fanciful yet sturdy metalwork he’s known for.
Railings, fireplace screens and andirons all over Mount Desert Island and beyond show his graceful designs of cattails, hummingbirds and Great Blue Herons worked into the metal.
“Steve saw himself as a tradesman,” Judith Blank said, in the tradition of the self-employed skilled people who controlled their own work situation. “They deserve respect for their skills. There’s a lot of pride in them. They can’t be pushed around at all.”
In some of those photos Steve Alsup is holding a cigarette or a can of beer, lifestyle habits Joshua did not gloss over in his blunt, unembellished prose.
“Here is my dad rolling a cigarette in the forests of La Verendrye Wildlife Refuge in Quebec,” he wrote in a caption to a camping trip photo. “I don’t know when my father started smoking. From my earliest memory until the stroke that hit him two years before his death, he rolled unfiltered cigarettes as often as every 20 minutes. He favored Turkish tobacco blends. Lung cancer would eventually kill him.”
After a 2012 stroke left him partially paralyzed and ended his long blacksmithing career, Steve Alsup eventually learned to move around the Bar Harbor property with a cane or wheelchair, cook food and take care of the animals, Joshua Alsup wrote. Two years later he was diagnosed with lung cancer and given only a few months to live.
“He elected to stay at home and not take chemotherapy treatments. One morning in early January of 2015 he was unable to rise from bed, and he died five minutes later,” Joshua Alsup wrote. “It’s kind of amazing that he never became bedridden. It would have really salted his nut to be dependent on my mom or a nurse. I like to think that at the moment of his dying he was satisfied that he avoided that.”
Standing in his spot
Since his dad’s death, in a time of big transitions, Joshua Alsup said he wants to come home to Maine, leaving the city behind. There’s work to do on the octagonal house and the lure of living a car-free lifestyle on Mount Desert Island in the summertime.
If things align for him, he’s interested in building something on the foundation where his dad’s blacksmith shop had stood for decades until it was demolished this spring.
“Eventually maybe I’ll be working on my own projects, with my own tools, standing in the spot where he once did,” Joshua wrote at the close of his photo essay.
His mother said she hopes it works out that way.
“Steve really wanted Josh to build a building, but thought he never would,” Judith said. “He would really be pleased.”
Writing and sharing the story has helped him get perspective on Maine and on his father — a complicated, imperfect, loving and loved person.
“I feel like I understood my dad. I think that I enjoyed portraying him the way he is,” Joshua Alsup said. “He wasn’t the easiest person to talk to. He was an old-school male. He was a well-rounded, flawed but also cool and a very capable person, which is how I want to remember him. Making a photo album that way helped me shape my memory.”
For his mom, the story Joshua told about his father feels true and fair and important.
“Steve, when I met him, secretly wanted to be a writer,” Judith said. “When Josh was born, I had the feeling that our story would continue — that somebody would tell our story. And here he’s gone and done it.”