The walk bespoke the man: a bit bockedy under a slew of slung cameras, but implacable, tank-like, with a pout of determination under a hair-oiled, seal-like head. He was built like the box Rollieflex he favoured.
Kevin McMahon, photographer and adventurer, was among the last of the legendary newspaper journeymen. He worked with this newspaper for 30 years up to his retirement, but always kept his lance free - right through an absorbing life. From his childhood, his freedom was his sword and shield.
He was sprung upon the world in Dublin on December 9th, 1921. He left it last April 6th. The extensive cancer that took him was surely unique - he said it never hurt at all.
His father, Paddy McMahon, was a Clongowes man. He worked in Todd Burns (now absorbed by Penneys) the retailers, as did and do three generations of the family: solid north Dublin stock. Kevin's mother, Florence Taylor, was Indian-born.
He was a test to his parents - and to all in authority. He decamped prematurely from St Vincent's national school in Phibsboro, aged 12. One of the first of the quite psychedelic jobs and activities he waded swiftly through was as the only male in a large pool of shorthand typists. In the paralysed 1930s he and a friend took Tebbit's orders 50 years before their delivery, got on their bikes (they hadn't the train fare) and cycled to Belfast for work. They bluffed their way into the Lilliput Laundry in Dunmurry as Dublin gentlemen-experts in the wild-hard science of steam and stain removal.
Dosshouse bed
Kevin shared a bed in a dosshouse with a gravely ill asthmatic. He turned his deaf ear (the one that sometimes heard selectively when the matter of buying drink arose) upwards, and his good ear to the pillow, to lessen the sound of a poor man gasping his last. Finally, the dawn he feared arrived. He woke beside a nameless, penniless corpse. How glamorous those 1930s were.
He started photographing aged 16. It was still a magic art. He was a weddings, wakes, dress-dance and "whatever" man. He met, adored until death, and married Mona, who was to run his busy northside commercial photography business until Nazism made its play. In wartime, the many necessary chemical and other photographic materials were too hard to get. Kevin, slightly worried about torpedoes, took ship for America.
He did his time on Ellis Island and lit upon New York. He took up the culinary arts in a short-order all-night cookhouse. A week or so later he put down the culinary arts (well, land-based ones) when two masked men, one with a gun, sought the takings in the customer-free early hours. Kevin was alacrity itself. Two went in and three went out, Kevin closing the door gingerly behind him.
Cook on schooner
He briefly photographed for the purposes of medical training. His studies were of the dead and what killed them, and the nearly dead. It must be said: what a way to make a living. Kevin took to the high seas again, as cook on a schooner plying the eastern United States coast, carrying naturalists and students. He had a budget to feed all hands. He took an acute interest in pre-trip weather - if all hands were feeding the fishes through sea-sickness, Kevin's wallet fattened.
He and his employers fell out in international waters. He contacted a pal (a man met where else but in a public house?) through ship-to-shore radio, was picked up from the schooner in the same man's seaplane, and disappeared o'er the waves to the home of the brave and the land not the sea.
In post-war New York, he found a nice but hectic line with a photographic agency holding the deal to take graduation photographs and individual portraiture for West Point Military Academy. But the damn bosses put Kevin on the spot again. If his boss didn't go and play tennis at 3 p.m. daily, Kevin wouldn't have been knocking off 10 minutes later and descending the several storeys to head for home. And he might not have forgotten about the prints he left on the dryer. And they might not have caught fire. The fire brigade might not have come and thoroughly doused the building, and the owners of the expensive furriers in the basement would not have been seen chasing through streets as their bedraggled thousand-dollar stock floated away on a river born of fire-brigade hoses.
Kevin said goodbye from a safe distance.
Back in Dublin he could be a three-weddings-a-day man. He roared around city and environs on a large and powerful BSA motorcycle in traditional softleather headgear - and goggles and all! He did work too for the Evening Mail, the Independent group and the Evening Press, mainly as snap man accompanying society diarists.
But he also photographed Eisenhower, Jack Dempsey, John Kennedy, Mohammed Ali, Grace and Rainier, Marcel Marceau, George Best and, over his six decades behind cameras, how many more? In his Irish Times work he delighted especially in a shot of a radiant John Kennedy leaving Iveagh House.
For a man in his line he had a dangerous relationship with celebratory cakes. Using a flash powder mix, "Mocco" once entirely over-egged the explosive pudding and blew up a wedding cake before a large audience. One another occasion he sought "elevation" on a bar stool for a shot of a retiree cutting a cake, wobbled, and became the main ingredient.
Kidnapped
He had back luck on his many frequent travels. He was almost killed by a motorcyclist on a Greek island and had to be airlifted to Athens. He was kidnapped in Bulgaria by a mock taxi-driver and his sidekick and driven to mountains. There being language difficulties, gestures were made suggesting he hand over his money right quick. Kevin turned his sad, hound-dog eyes on his kidnapper and communicated that really, he had so little (he had a lot). He produced a bottle of indigestion tablets and intimated that his poor bad heart couldn't take all this at all.
His kidnappers drove him back to his hotel. And bought him a brandy for his nerves.
He leaves Mona, their children Peter, David, Anita, and Kevie, and 24 grandchildren. He leaves many others smiling in fondness of him and the dead, wild days; he leaves us laughing aloud.