I love it when my photo life and my Twitter (now X) life intersect. It’s even better when an event crosses over into my weekly column life. It’s the trifecta of storytelling.

In October of 1995, I was out scouring the county for a feature photo for the front page. I found out early in my photojournalism career that driving around aimlessly never really yielded a good slice of life photo. The odds of coming across someone doing something are slim. It is better to go where people are gathered doing something.

With it being so close to Halloween, I figured Jackson’s Orchard on Slim Island Road would be a target-rich environment. I knew they had pumpkins on display and for sale, so I figured my odds were pretty good that I could make a photo that I didn’t mind putting my name under. Little did I know, I was in for a treat of a photo that would come back to me several times 20 and nearly 30 years later.

I stumbled across Doug and Cindy Kimbler taking photos of their 5-week-old son, Lucas, who was dressed as a jack-o-lantern. He was lying atop a huge bin of tiny pumpkins. I nearly broke my ankles getting over to them. I rushed up with my cameras at the ready, the whole time blurting out, “I’m Joe Imel, photographer at Daily News” as I reeled off frames.

The sunlight was just right and it made for a great photo. I dropped the mic, my searching and shooting done for the day. All that was left was to process the Kodak Ektapress 400 film and scan my photo into the system. The picture ran on the front page of the Daily News the next day, was picked up by the Associated Press and used in papers all over. I entered the snap in a few photo contests where it did well.

I had forgotten about pumpkin-boy until about five or six years ago when Lucas, who was now in his late 20s, tweeted a photo of him on the front page of the paper along with a reenactment of the scene about 22 years later. A few years ago, it was a popular trend for folks to post themselves reenacting photos from the past. I got a real chuckle out of it.

Fast-forward to 2024, 29 years after the I took the photo, and in walks a man to drop off a news item to the paper. He introduced himself a Doug Kimbler, “pumpkin boy’s dad.” I busted out laughing and we relived the event, reminiscing about Lucas and the pumpkin reenactment. Doug commented on my weekly column and decided to drop off a new tip about a relative, Artis Eadens, 96, who was receiving his 75th year Masonic pin Feb. 10 at Arcadia Senior Living.

I told Doug it’s a rare occurrence when someone crosses into my photo, social media and writing life. He might not be the first, but it has been the most enjoyable reliving and telling the story. When he left, I jumped up and rooted through bins of mounted prints from years ago and handed him a color print of Lucas I entered in the contests.

After Doug left, I looked through the stacks of photos and found about a dozen that were frames that I liked of local coaches, players, people and events that I entered in contests. I get calls every week from people looking for photos I took of them over the years. It’s tough to find them in the hundreds of thousands of image files I have stored on hard drive, Zip disks, Iomega drives, CDs and now, the cloud. My goal is to archive everything by name and date. That monumental task likely will have to wait until I leave the paper. There are just not enough hours in the day right now.

My plan is to start handing those out some 30 years later. So, if you get a random package in the mail from the Daily News, just know that you were the subject of some of my favorite photographs.

– Daily News General Manager Joe Imel can be reached at (270) 783-3273 or via email at joe.imel@bgdailynews.com.