His father, by profession a plumber, wanted his son to follow his trade. Instead, Arthur Griffin, in 1923 at the age of twenty, enrolled at the New School of Design on Boylston Street in Boston.

If this decision to become an artist disappointed his father, that feeling did not last long. One day, when Arthur was in class drawing a nude model, he felt someone come up behind and put a hand on his shoulder. It was his father who told him, “Now I see why you wanted to be an artist.”

This anecdote, shared with me last week by the 96-year-old Arthur Griffin (not one of my relatives), was one of many fascinating facts that I learned about this dynamic man. We talked for hours at the Arthur Griffin Center for Photographic Art in Winchester, a museum adorned with the artistry that has made him New England’s most celebrated photographer.

His friend John Updike says of Arthur, “He could have been an acrobat or a tightrope walker.” Herb Kenny, another old friend, takes issue with a neighbor who pronounces “Arthur is more an artist than a craftsman.” Not so, says Kenny, “He’s both, there’s no distinction between them.”

Arthur loves to dress flamboyantly. At his most recent birthday party last September, he wore a green jacket flecked with white, yellow shirt, and a gold crown. That’s the kind of person he is, this Wizard of Winchester, as I like to call him. High achiever and, at the same time, a dedicated self-promoter, Arthur says he confounds many people who meet him. “It’s impossible,” they tell him, “You can’t be that old.”

Meeting Arthur, you can look into the future and see what most people will be like when they approach their hundredth birthday, one or two hundred years from now. He carries on with his life as if old age were not a factor except that it has furnished him with a long lifetime’s varied experience.

Blessed with physical and mental vigor, Arthur gets up each day with enthusiasm. “I just can’t stay in bed.” he claims. “What keeps me going is I have so much to do.” Asked if he is shooting at a hundred, he promptly replies, “Of course I am.”

What most impresses me about him is his satisfaction with the life he has lived. “I was born at exactly the right time,” he judges. When he came along, the world was ready for him to make his mark. And that is what he has done, mostly through creative use of what was, when he started, still a relatively new art – photography.

He has managed to live a highly creative life despite a life-long severe stutter. This handicap does not stop him from being adventurous; far from ignoring it, however, he and his friends like to joke about it. During our long conversation, I took it as a sign of the man’s authenticity.

When he first came to work at the Boston Globe in 1929, he drew illustrations for ads. Only after several years of this kind of art work did he become a photographer. At first, he took photos for himself as he learned how to use his camera most effectively. By the late thirties, the Globe was publishing his photos, many of them showing his distinctive creativity.

Among these works, he feels special affection for those he took of Ted Williams in 1938. Williams was nineteen years old then, a Red Sox rookie, and, according to Arthur, “the nicest person I have ever seen.” That’s when Arthur took color films of the slugger that hold a unique place in baseball history.

Using some new color film sent him by Eastman Kodak, Arthur worked with Ted for two hours. The resulting color shots were not published at the time; in fact, they disappeared for fifty years. When found, they gave memorable evidence of Arthur’s creativity. Ted appears as the gangling, amazingly thin young man he was; his perfect swing showed the tremendous power generated by the torque of his body.

Many other famous people have posed for Arthur or been caught unawares by his camera. Heavyweight champion Joe Louis, newly elected president Franklin Roosevelt, and Boston legend James Michael Curley figure prominently among them. So do Bette Davis and Elizabeth Taylor.

Arthur also has a wide reputation for his outdoor scenes of New England. Seeing the houses, snow covered fields, and seascapes of this region as Arthur has captured them, I felt a renewed sense of regional beauty. Many of these scenes were featured on the covers of national magazines for which he worked as a freelancer.

In recent years he has established two foundations, the first to ensure that his center lasts. His second fundraising success has provided money for his home town of Winchester to make it more beautiful. “The best thing I have ever done is fundraising,” says this adventurer who has accomplished so much else.

Richard Griffin