From https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2010/12/kelty.html

As a postscript to a "Dagors Away" post, this "lens-love" has gotten me thinking about Edward J. Kelty, the famous circus photographer. For those who practice large format, his 2002 book Step Right This Way: The Photographs of Edward J. Kelty is a must see, if not a "must-buy."

Kelty traveled the hinterlands from the 1920s to the '40s, photographing circuses and individual performers, mostly on a 12x20 Banquet camera, as well as some 11x14 and 8x10; he sold the photographs to collectors and performers commercially. His work is really quite supreme. I recently had the pleasure to speak with his grandson at a party I attended in Washington D.C. (he lives across the alley from some friends of mine), and maybe he is at the top of my mind because of this.

Anyway, like many photographers, his life in the business really wound down far before his talents did, and he spent the last part of his life living in a small apartment in Chicago, working at Cubs games at Wrigley field selling beer, soda, and the rest. It was a very solitary life at this point, and he was un-lauded as well as un-rediscovered until after his death.

Story is, and I think it mentions this in the book, that after his death, they went through his apartment, and there was virtually no camera or photographic equipment of any kind, save for a box with his favorite lens in it....