Bodine smoked corncob pipes, wore tailored shirts and tattersall vests and sported a bright-green silk suit that caused Jennifer to walk several feet behind him out of embarrassment.
He was also a man of many pet hates, his editor wrote in a magazine The Sun produced when he died.
"It would be impossible to list them all for reasons of space, propriety and the possibility of libel," as Williams put it. "But here is a sampler, not necessarily in the order of his animosity: the Red Cross, Formstone, baked potatoes in tinfoil jackets, liberals, exposure meters ... Howard Johnson restaurants, long pencils, architects, pie that was cut in more than four slices, race horses, editorial writers, ... plastic, [and] the National Safety Council."
He kept his equipment in his two-door Ford Galaxie and stopped when he saw a good subject. "I missed all but the last 10 minutes of so many birthday parties," she says.
When Jennifer started dating, he put all her suitors in the same category. "The rapist is here," he'd tell her mother, Nancy, when one arrived.
During a rough patch in her parents' marriage, Jennifer dropped from the honor roll to last in her class, threatening her high school graduation. Bodine, a sometime heavy drinker, never discussed it with her. "He liked things to work out on their own," she says.
Despite a childhood she describes as "totally off the rails," she adored Bodine -- even when, at 64, he challenged her decision to go to law school.
"You're a girl," he said. "Juries won't take you seriously! You'll become a lawyer over my dead body."
"So be it," she snapped.
A few days later, as he worked in The Sun's darkroom, he collapsed on the floor, felled by a stroke. Six hours later, he was gone.
Web site launched
Bodine practiced law for a few years, quitting only when the stress started giving her nausea. After that, she made and sold stained glass, much of which she displays in the home on the Choptank River she shares with her husband, Web entrepreneur Richard Orban. In 1999, when Maryland Public Television announced it was producing a documentary on six Chesapeake Bay artists, including Bodine, Orban started scanning the family collection and putting it online.
Over the past nine years, they've corralled, touched up, digitized, organized and printed thousands of Bodines, many of them not seen publicly in years. AAubrey Bodine.com, the Web site that catalogues and disseminates his work for sale, has become a lucrative business.
