Pop-culture icon Andy Warhol said we all have it coming to us -- 15 minutes of fame. But when Warhol made that statement, he couldn't have had in mind someone like Bobby Cox, wife of Jerome R. Cox Jr., Sc.D., the Harold B. and Adelaide G. Welge Professor of Computer Science.
In 1952, Bobby Cox performed a feat in less than three minutes that brought her an anonymous sort of fame that has endured for more than four decades. The stunning, sequential image of her as a young woman skipping rope is part of a photographic legacy that occupies a prevailing niche in American popular culture.
The photograph -- taken by the late engineer/photographer Harold Edgerton -- and others by him were on display at The Saint Louis Art Museum recently. The museum holds 18 Edgerton photographs donated by the Harold and Esther Edgerton Foundation and others from a 1991 gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles F. Turner.
In the winter of 1952, the newly married Bobby Cox was Edgerton's secretary at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Edgerton, who was an electrical engineering professor there, asked her if she would help him with a photographic demonstration he was planning for a class.
All she had to do was skip some rope.
There were a few minor drawbacks, however. She would have to perform the simple athletic task in a crowded lecture hall in pitch darkness across a series of black-papered laboratory tables. The darkness was necessary to use the pulsating strobe lighting that created a stop-action effect when it flashed. To prepare for the demonstration, Bobby Cox took only one practice run with the lights on before the real thing with the lights off.
"I had complete confidence in 'Doc,'" she said of Edgerton. "The flashes from cameras in the audience and the strobe lights were a bit distracting. It was over very quickly, and he went on photographing four or five others creating different motions. I only skipped across those tables once and had no idea at the time that I was doing anything other than helping my boss."
The recent exhibit at the art museum isn't the first time this Edgerton photograph has been displayed in St. Louis.
"About 20 years ago, the photograph and others were on tour, and they were displayed at the old St. Louis Science Center at Oak Knoll," Jerry Cox said. "Our youngest son, Randy, was 10 or 11 and asked us, 'What's Nancy doing in that picture?' He thought the girl was his sister because Nancy then was about the age of her mother when she did the demonstration. He had a hard time making the connection that that was his mother."
Both Jerry and Bobby Cox, who independently were friends with Edgerton before the two met in 1948, credit Edgerton with influencing the direction of their lives.
"I got to know 'Doc' when I took a senior-level electronics course from him in 1946," said Jerry Cox, who, like his friend and mentor, has done remarkable things with speed and light -- in the areas of biomedical computing and high-speed fiber-optic telecommunications networking. "I'd given a little thought to teaching, but he was the one who encouraged me, suggesting I go to graduate school."
Bobby Cox had been working as a secretary in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering when Edgerton asked her to be his secretary. She waited until after her wedding (Edgerton photographed the event) to accept, which she did from Niagara Falls.
"I worked for him for two years, up until our first child was born," Bobby Cox recalled. "He was an excellent boss, and I was exposed to all those famous images and some famous people, too, such as Jacques Cousteau, who collaborated with him on underwater photography."
Jerry Cox and Donald L. Snyder, Ph.D., the Samuel C. Sachs Professor of Electrical Engineering, were influential in Edgerton's receiving an honorary degree from Washington University in 1979.
Edgerton, who died in 1990, was highly regarded for his engineering prowess. Combining darkness, speed, timing and light, he invented strobe lighting to photograph the motions of rotating machines. While the technique had many industrial and technological uses, Edgerton quickly saw that his discovery was a springboard to illustrating previously uncaptured motions or phenomena that could not be followed by the human eye.
Edgerton's photographs -- depicting everything from a bullet slicing through a playing card, to the "milk coronet" created by a drop of milk in a bowl, to the first evening image of an atomic detonation -- gained a foothold in the American conscience. The picture of Bobby Cox skipping rope became a staple of prime Edgerton photographs and has been shown in countless museums, many photography books, The New York Times and revised editions of Edgerton's classic 1930s book "Flash."
The Coxes still look at that one Edgerton photo -- titled "Moving Skip Rope" -- with wonder and nostalgia.
"We were at the museum and a young man was looking at the picture, and I couldn't help saying, rather awkwardly, 'That's me up there,'" Bobby Cox said. "He looked at me and said, 'I can't believe it.' Well, sometimes I can't either. When I did the demonstration, I never gave it a thought that I'd even see the picture. Shooting images was something 'Doc' did all the time. It's a continuing amazement to us and really something that the picture has a home in St. Louis."
-- Tony Fitzpatrick
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