Damn, it's hard to cover news stories when you know the people involved in them, and you have to put aside personal feelings to get the story.

I got an e-mail before dawn yesterday from a friend who lives three blocks away. Her dog had decided it had to mark its territory at 4 a.m., and she couldn't get back to sleep. She was working on her computer when she heard noise at the front door. It was the newspaper carrier, trying to get her attention. He had found a man lying in the snow, bleeding, three blocks away, and was desperately trying to find someone awake who could call the police.

It was below zero overnight, and the man's body temperature was 85 degrees when he got to the hospital. He was alive, though, and in stable condition. We have been writing lots of stories about the bitter and dangerously cold weather these days, and this story was to be an important component of Friday's paper.

There were two aspects to it. The obvious one was the story of a man who had almost frozen to death, but the second, equally important story, was that of Dan Overstreet, the hero, the carrier who had found the man.

Dan also drives a school bus, and so we weren't able to get hold of him until almost 5 p.m. An hour earlier, I'd learned the identity of the man he'd found.

He is Raymond Lewis, who lives just a block from me, whom I knew from the four years our oldest son, Adam, had a paper route. He is a Korean War veteran, and a former prisoner of war, who lives alone. The whole neighborhood knows Lewis. He loves older Mercury and Lincoln cars, and he has to move his cars from one side of the street to the other every day to comply with overnight parking regulations.

Lewis was part of a veterans' day feature we had done two years ago, so I pulled his portrait from the archive to run with the story. I wanted more than "head shots" of Overstreet and Lewis, though, and when Overstreet called, I asked if I could photograph him at the hospital with Lewis, if Lewis didn't mind. Lewis consented. Overstreet agreed to the photo, if I could then give he and his son a ride to their basketball practice. We were set, I thought, and I told the copy editor handling page one to expect a photo from the hospital in place of the file head shot of Lewis.

I ran into a roadblock at the hospital, though, when the nursing staff saw me and insisted on checking with Lewis themselves. I protested that I already had his consent, but to no avail. The nursing supervisor went to his room and came back with the news that he was embarassed about what had happened - police reports said he had been drinking before he fell at the bottom of the steep steps to his home. He thought I wanted to take a picture just for Overstreet to have, and he did not want the picture in the paper. I don't always trust people in authority when they get throw up obstacles to photographers, but I had no reason to doubt the nurse. I called back to the paper with word that we would be able to run only the file photo of Lewis, and a head shot of Overstreet.

I wanted to go into Lewis' room just to wish him well. I wanted to go into Lewis' room to take a picture of he and Overstreet for them to have. Instead, I stayed down the hall, by the nurses' station. Experience told me that if I gave in to my personal feelings, I might jeopardize the whole story because Lewis might then not want to talk to the reporter who was calling him. Sometimes people react differently when talking to a reporter on the phone than when a photographer comes to take their picture. A phone interview can provide a level of comfort and distance for them that they lose when they are being photographed. It was too important a story to risk losing, in terms of the cold weather emergency and the story of the hero newspaper carrier.

When the nurse told me that Lewis and Overstreet were acting like old friends when they met, I ached for a photo for the newspaper. I could only imagine the scene. And that is all our readers could do, too, when they read the story this morning.

Behind the Viewfinder - A Year in the Life of Photojournalism
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