Yates got two whacks in rapid succession, losing his father in 1978 and then his mother in 1979. An only child, Yates had to deal with the loss and all the estate issues that must be cleaned up in the wake of a death.

“I didn’t even pick up a camera for about a year,” he says. “But what got me going again was picking up a camera and starting to travel.”

During that time, he met the woman who has been his wife for almost 33 years, Chrys. He was offered a job as a gallery director at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, and they moved west, got married and began a family. After seven years in Las Cruces, they returned to Yates’ childhood hometown of Jacksonville, where they’ve been ever since. For many years, Yates made a living with work as an aerial photographer.

But after he passed age 60, Yates says, “I got this burr under my saddle to get back to my own personal work and make some sense out of 40 years of shooting.” The entire Yates family — Bill and Chrys and their children Calder and Micaela — is prone to conversation about the arts. Chrys directs the Center for Humanities in Medicine, which integrates the arts into patient therapy, at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Calder works as a curator, writer and artist, and Micaela, like her mom, is pursuing a career where the arts merge with medicine.

All the Yateses had seen Bill’s proofs of the Sweetheart roller rink, so when he began to complain of the burr beneath his saddle, they suggested he revisit that project first. So Yates began the slow process of reviewing, scanning and digitizing more than 700 2¼-inch-square negatives from his year at the Sweetheart. Eventually, he narrowed the project down to a much smaller set of images and printed them.