Joe Ray Roberson, longtime Dispatch photographer, was one of those people so well known around town, the use of a surname was superfluous, if not confusing; he was simply “Joe Ray.” Roberson died early Sunday morning after a long illness. He was 71.
“He was a good fellow and I’m going to miss him a bunch,” said his friend and fellow photographer David Allen Williams, who was at Roberson’s bedside when he died.
Joe Ray worked for this newspaper twice, once in the 60s and then again later in life. Over the course of his career, he shot hundreds of high school football games, innumerable car wrecks and countless pictures of children on playgrounds. He was everywhere.
In the 90s, after running a photo studio with his wife, Regina, and serving as sports editor at The Daily Mountain Eagle in Jasper, Ala., Roberson returned to The Dispatch. Soon afterwards the newspaper made the shift from film to digital, a transition Joe Ray made without a blink.
Joe Ray loved the life of a news photographer. He loved people, too, and photography was one way he connected with them. He was a talker.
My niece, who worked a summer photography internship at The Dispatch, spent a lot of that time riding shotgun with Joe Ray. It was a memorable, if not treasured, experience for her, and it takes little prompting to get her to recount her Joe Ray stories in Joe Ray’s voice.
“You gotta get in there and get your picture and get out,” he told her after going down into a ditch to photograph line workers with a dead snake.
Joe Ray always got his picture.
But he wasn’t always Joe Ray.
“One thing you should know about Joe Ray,” says Williams, laughing, “was that his real name wasn’t Joe Ray. His real name was Ray L. Roberson.”
Here’s how that happened, according to Williams: Joe Ray was a high school track star, who was small for his age. He was so good his coach Billy Brewer wanted to enter him in varsity and junior varsity events, something the rules did not allow. The ever-inventive Brewer entered his star runner in some events as Joe L. Roberson and others as Joe Ray Roberson. Brewer liked the sound of “Joe Ray” better, and the name stuck.
When he could manage it, he would shoot SEC football games with his buddy Williams. They were a pair: David Allen with his machine-gun rat-a-tat-tat of jokes and Joe Ray, the non-stop socializer.
And there were the road trips with Henry Matuszak, a sometimes cantankerous sports editor who required the navigational and social skills Joe Ray was happy to provide. Seeing that odd couple — Henry tall and taciturn, Joe Ray compact and gregarious — leaving for Tuscaloosa, Birmingham or Omaha was to see Calvin and Hobbes setting out on a new adventure, the world brimming with promise and adventure.
Somewhere along the way — perhaps it is an occupational hazard — Roberson became a connoisseur of road food.
“Best potato logs in the state of Mississippi,” he declared, speaking of Dodge’s Quick Stop in Okolona. He could tell you about Dreamland and Archibald’s, too.
Once he returned from a road trip with bottle of orange-colored peach soda for me. I still have it on my desk, a poignant, quirky reminder of Joe Ray.
When we have gone, there are the stories we leave behind. As for Joe Ray, there will be no shortage of stories told, stories that are funny, never cynical or critical, stories that show a deep affection for others.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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