Ringgold grad wins three Emmys for WQED documentaries on WWII artist
Elizabeth Black sketched soldiers, sailors and airmen during World War II and sent the portraits to worried family members back home.
David Solomon
One of Elizabeth Black’s World War II sketches
Pittsburgh portrait artist Elizabeth Black felt the call to travel overseas with the American Red Cross during World War II, but she quickly grew tired of serving coffee and doughnuts to U.S. soldiers on leave in London.
“She said she could do more,” said David Solomon, a Ringgold High School graduate who has won three Emmy Awards for documentaries he produced about Black’s story for WQED in Pittsburgh.
Black, who was in her early 30s, persuaded a superior to allow her to travel to battlefields around Europe to draw charcoal sketches of soldiers and send them home to their relatives as a goodwill gesture, said Solomon, a 1972 graduate of Ringgold’s Monongahela Division.
She became a well-known artist in Pittsburgh before the war, creating portraits for the city’s high society. However, many of her portraits created “from field camp to field camp” were either lost in the mail or disappeared after the war ended, Solomon said.
It didn’t take long for Black to realize during the war that she needed a record of her project, prompting her to create high-quality photographs of the portraits, many of which contained autographs and messages from the soldiers.
“The are just as good as having the sketch,” Solomon said.
She started dating a Navy commander she drew, Julian Black, and they married in late 1944 in Paris. However, Elizabeth Black never went back to producing art after the couple settled in Virginia until after her husband died in his 40s. She died at age 71 in Portland, Ore.
The Army footlocker where she kept her war records turned up in an in-law’s garage in northern California, where it “languished for 20 years unopened and untouched,” Solomon said.
The old trunk was then sent to her son, John Black of Memphis, Tenn., and after he opened it, “He said, ‘Holy cow, look at all of this stuff,'” Solomon said, adding that 100 photographs of her sketches – of the more than 1,000 she created – were discovered in the files.
John Black reached out to the public television station in Memphis, which referred the story to WQED because it didn’t do much programing and the Pittsburgh affiliate does, he said.
Solomon said he set out to find the men in the photographs or their children for the first documentary, “Portraits for the Home Front: The Story of Elizabeth Black,” that aired nationally in 2014 and won an Emmy.
“It was grueling. A lot of the families didn’t have them.”
The children of the veterans, “they would practically fall off their chairs with excitement” after they were told WQED had a wartime sketch of their father.
Solomon said the station began to receive calls from genealogists offering to help find the relatives of the men in the sketches after they watched the documentary.
“The real reward is when you meet up with these families,” he said.
The next documentary, “Finding Elizabeth’s Soldiers,” aired nationally this year and captured two Emmy Awards.
As a result, 65 of the 100 photographs have been reunited with families, and others who have the original sketches have photographed them and added them to the Black collection at WQED.
Solomon, 60, of Forest Hills, has collected 29 career Emmys, having worked at WQED since 2000, and is the station’s multimedia executive producer. Previously, he worked for 13 years at CBS as a news and program producer.
He even produced live shows as a kid in Monongahela for the neighborhood, sometimes using a blanket as a backdrop and selling home-baked pies, said Laura Magone, who does volunteer public relations work at Monongahela Area Historical Society.
“He’s such a down-to-earth person,” Magone said. “His work is impressive.”
Solomon will speak and show one of the documentaries Thursday at a sold-out event for the historical society at Mon Valley Hospital.