COMMUNITY
Days Gone By BY KATIE SHANDS
An entire community is mourning the loss of William Robert “Bob” Canaday, Jr., a beloved photographer who made it his personal mission to preserve Franklin’s past by collecting and archiving the area’s historic pictures. After forty-seven years of making an indelible mark on Williamson County, he peacefully passed away in April. Bob and his wife, Jackie, moved to Franklin in 1974 from Miami, where he had established himself as a successful medical researcher. Forever self-effacing, Bob never spoke about this part of his past. Still, he was instrumental in developing the heart-lung bypass machine and actively participated in the first kidney transplant. It was highly unusual to work on both the harvest and transplant teams, but Bob was more than qualified. “He truly was a visionary. I always marveled at his intuitiveness,” Jackie says. After the Canadays’ arrived in Franklin, Vanderbilt University Medical Center offered Bob a position, but he had his sights set on a different career path: Photography. He had an uncanny ability to attract people into his orbit and soon connected with Togue Uchida, the premier photographer in Nashville during that time. Togue became his lifelong mentor and friend. For two years, Bob operated a color lab out of his house. He made prints for a local photographer, Marvin Lee Compton, Jr., and when Marvin died, Bob acquired all of his negatives. This was the beginning of Bob’s lifelong role as custodian of Franklin’s photographic history. He later purchased the entire pictorial library of Woody Dickerson, a Franklin photographer whose work spanned the late forties to the mid-sixties. Woody’s negatives were a priceless record of the town, and Bob recognized their historic value.
Bob Canaday HONORING THE LIFE OF BELOVED PHOTOGRAPHER & ARCHIVIST
56 | SUMMER 2022
In 1975, the Canadays’ set up shop on Franklin’s Main Street in the building where McCreary’s now operates. Jackie ran a bridal store on the first floor while Bob opened Canaday Photography upstairs. As it turned out, his studio provided the perfect opportunity to add to his growing archive. “People started bringing in pictures of their families,” Jackie says. “Bob would ask if they had any photos of Main Street or the surrounding area. Then, he’d copy the images for the archives and make the person a print as well.” After years of collecting photographs, disaster struck on March 2, 1981. Redmond’s Liquors on Main Street caught fire, and the blaze spread to the Canaday’s building two doors down. Jackie lost more than 100 wedding dresses, but Bob’s studio suffered the worst damage. The blaze obliterated his photography equipment and about 17,000 negatives from the Dickerson files. Despite this setback, Bob was not deterred. He started his archives anew, and eventually, the Canadays’ published the pictures in two
