A KINDER, GENTLER WORLD

I seem to recall it as a kinder, more gentle time. Of course, I was a younger man and my career was on the rise and everything seemed fresher; newer; more challenging. There were still a few newspapers left in New York City and some of them were capable of doing some really good photography.

I had seen Newsday go from a sleepy little six day a week publication to a seven day a week paper with a growing reputation and an increasing respect in the field of journalism for some really good photography. And I enjoyed my role as part of a staff of innovators.

When I first started working there, we weren’t covering major league sports. The wires took care of our needs and we were relegated to shooting high school baseball, football and basketball. A really big sports assignment might be one of the university games, but mostly it was high school baseball.

I am sure that everyone who has ever shot high school baseball knows how frustrating it can be to get some good action shots. Mostly the games are no hitters (ergo, no base runners) or everyone hits home runs (ergo, no base runners). They only play 7 innings and by the time the 7th inning rolls around and all you have in the bag are some shots of the starting pitchers, you start to get antsy and do strange things to come up with something in the way of action. Once I set my shutter speed real slow and panned with a batter trying to stretch an infield hit into a single. My blurred shot worked. His effort didn’t. He was thrown out.

But, as the paper grew and our staff increased, the Sports Department thought it would be nice to staff the Yankees, Mets, NY Football Giants and the Jets (before they became the NJ Jets and the Knicks and the Rangers and Islanders. Big time sports, at last. Unfortunately for me, I had enough seniority by then, to be working day shifts and there aren’t too many big league sporting events that take place between 9 and 5. Once in awhile, though, I would fill in for someone at night or I would get to cover an opening day baseball game which usually occurred in the early afternoon.

I soon found out that you didn’t get to see much of the game through that little peep hole in the back of your camera. And you were generally concentrating on a runner at first base, focusing on him in case he got picked off or if he broke for second on a steal, you would follow him and focus on the fly. And because of that kind of tunnel vision, I would miss some diving catches of line drives by some infielder. I learned to keep one eye on the viewfinder and the other eye open to the entire playing field. Some people can react quickly if they see a play developing outside of the viewfinder. I didn’t get to do enough sports photography to develop that kind of skill. I usually managed to come back with something, but I never really made it as a sports photographer.

I remember covering a Met game at Shea Stadium one evening. We didn’t have the capability of transmiting photos from the stadiums in those days. And digital photography hadn’t even been thought of. So, we would have to pack up our gear somewhere around the 6th inning to head back out to Long Island to process and print our shots in order to make deadline. This night, as I was schlepping my camera gear across the parking lot, some guy and his gal came rushing past me on the way to the stadium.

“What’s the score?” he yelled at me as I headed for my car.

Score??? Geez, I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention to that. I wasn't even sure what teams were playing, because I was concentrating on the action as seen through that little glass window on the back of my Nikon. I tell that story to people who tell me how lucky I am to see the games from such a wonderful vantage point.

One of the great things about covering NY major league sports was the great bunch of old timers that were there day after day or night after night. The press was always invited to partake of a fine buffet laid out by the teams, before the game, and I enjoyed listening to some of these greats tell about shooting some classic photos.

I recall one afternoon, covering a NY Yankee game up at Yankee Stadium in The Bronx. “The House that Ruth built” was what the place was known as. It reeked of history and the ghosts of some of the greatest sports legends in baseball haunted the spacious cavern of the stadium. I usually set up in the press box that hung behind home plate from one of the upper tiers. It was the safest place from which to shoot if you were the only shooter from your paper. If you shot from one of the ground level positions by First or Third base, there was always a chance that the action would take place on the opposite side of the field. If you did get a shot from field level, it was always more dramatic than from the high level press box. But the high shot was always safest.

Each paper had gaffer tape on the ledge that was built into the front wall of the box. On it was printed the name of the paper, so there was little chance that you would arrive to find all the good spots taken by some shooter from out of town. Those of us using 35mm cameras bolted a high hat to the ledge with some “C” clamps and mounted a camera with a lens in the neighborhood of 300 or 400 mm. For those of you who don’t know what a high hat is, it’s like a heavy duty tripod pan head without the tripod.

Some of the old timers with the city papers used to shoot with Hultchers. These were huge cannons with motor drives and large rolls of film that gave you an images size in the neighborhood of 5 inches high by 6 or 7 inches wide. I am probably off on those dimensions, but they did give you large images and the resulting prints would knock your socks off. There was a kind of gun sight that you used to aim the camera and the focusing on these beasts was a rather unique system. There was a lever on the side of the camera that ran across a rachet. There was a way to swing a ground glass into position so that you could focus. Every time one would set up a Hultcher at a new stadium, the photographer would use the ground glass to focus in on each base, including home plate and the pitcher’s mound. Then on all of the field positions. And when the position was focused you would set the rachet mechanism for that position and mark it with a piece of gaffer tape. Every position on the field was thus covered and marked. When the game got under way, you merely swung the camera to follow the action and you worked the focusing lever like a gear shift to ensure that you were focused on the particular part of the playing field where the action was taking place. When you hit the button, the shutter would open and shut with a loud “CLACK” and the film would advance to the next frame. There was a way to cut the exposed film off inside the camera after it wound into a light tight receiving cassette. Most papers had messengers pick up the film from the early innings, and this way they didn’t have to ship in huge amounts of unexposed film. You merely cut off the exposed portion, placed a new receiving casset in place and attached a leader and continued to shoot.

There was a photographer from one of the city papers whom everone liked, but who was known for his terrible drinking problem. Everyone of us knew that his job was hanging by a thread because of it. He would show up long after the game began and would barely be able to stand upright. He would fumble around trying to get his Hultcher set up and one of the other photographers would have to help him. Before he ever got a chance to fire off a frame, he would slump to the floor of the press box, unconscious. A couple of us would carry him to the back of the booth and lay him down on a bench, and if it was cool, we would cover him with our jackets. Then each of us would take a turn shooting for him. We would each donate a half an inning to cover the game for him, which meant giving up a half an inning of shooting for our own paper. This was in an era where competition between the papers was at its fiercest.

Chances are that we were doing this poor soul no favor. All we did was make it possible for him to keep drinking. He kept his job until his paper became one of many casualties of the shrinking media of the 60’s and 70’s, and he was never picked up by any of the surviving papers. But, at least we had the knowledge that because of what we did, he was able to bring home a regular paycheck for his wife and kids.

As I said, it was a kinder, gentler world.

Behind the Viewfinder - A Year in the Life of Photojournalism
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