Charles Bukowski (11 page)

Henry and Kate’s goldschatz, their golden boy, in his new home town of Los Angeles in the mid-1920s.
(courtesy of Karl Fett)

The bungalow at 2122 Longwood Avenue, Los Angeles, as it was when the Bukowski family lived there in the 1930s. Bukowski was made to manicure the front lawn every Saturday and beaten if he missed a single blade.
(courtesy of Karl Fett)

Bukowski and his father pose in the family model-T Ford in which they took trips out of Los Angeles into the orange groves of the surrounding countryside.
(courtesy of Karl Fett)

When he was 16, suffering from terrible acne and attending Mount Vernon Junior High School, Bukowski posed for a class photograph. He is in the front row, fi fth from the left with his arms crossed. The fi rst boy in the front row, wearing an open-neck white shirt and grey trousers, is Bukowski’s friend William ‘Baldy’ Mullinax.
(courtesy of Mount Vernon Junior High School)

Bukowski (centre) looks older than 18 in his Los Angeles High School year book photograph for the graduating class of summer, 1939.
(courtesy of Los Angeles
High School)

Sgt Henry Charles Bukowski Jnr in his ROTC uniform along with school friends; from left to right; Bloomer, Cavanaugh and Corbeil
(courtesy of Los Angeles High School)

Jane Cooney Baker, the great love of Bukowski’s life who inspired so much of his best work. This is the fi rst photograph of Jane ever published. It was taken for her High School year book in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1927 when she was 17 years old.
(courtesy of Roswell High School)

Taken at his parents’ Longwood Avenue home in July, 1947, this photograph shows a remarkably well-groomed Charles Bukowski, aged 27, at a time in his life when he later claimed to have been living as a bum.
(courtesy of Karl Fett)

A rare glimpse of Bukowski, relaxing with his ‘magic dog’, taken in the early 1950s when he was living with Jane Cooney Baker. On the back of the picture Bukowski wrote this caption: ‘… long ago on a deserted beach with a fi ne and beautiful dog.’ Note: the marks on the picture are from the pressure of Bukowski’s handwriting on the back.
(courtesy of Special Collections,
The University of Arizona Library)

This building at 603 N. 17th Street, Philadelphia, was a rooming house where Bukowski lived when he was in the city during his ten year drunk.
(picture taken by Brenda Galloway
for Howard Sounes)

Bukowski lived with Jane at this apartment court at 268 S. Coronado Street in downtown Los Angeles.
(picture taken by Howard Sounes)

Barbara Frye’s physical deformity is clear in this photograph taken at the Frye Ranch in Wheeler, Texas, in 1954 - the year before she met and married Bukowski. She was born with two vertebra missing from her neck giving the impression she was permanently hunching her shoulders.
(courtesy of Leah Belle Wilson)