KENT STATE, 1970
John Filo
National Guardsmen fired on the crowd, killing four and wounding nine others. Among the bystanders was John Filo, who happened to have his Nikkormat loaded with Kodak Tri-X. He snapped away as the scene unfolded in front of him.
Roll back the clock. John Filo spent his summer as a photo intern at his hometown newspaper, the Valley News Dispatch, a small daily newspaper based in in Tarentum, Pa., about 20 miles north or Pittsburgh. John grew up in neighboring Natrona Heights, so the Valley News Dispatch was familiar to him. When the summer ended, John returned to school at Kent State.
After taking his photos, he called the Associated Press, which rebuffed him. They hadn't heard of any shooting at Kent State, and he was just a kid. Why should they pay attention to him? This was before the age of the Internet and smartphones and before every trifling occurrence had become a "gone viral" event on the Web and social media.
John called The Valley News Dispatch. They were interested and told him to bring in his film so they could see what he had. John drove the 110 miles to Tarentum, where the photography staff "souped" his negatives. A contact sheet was made, and a photo was selected. By now, news of the shooting had begun to spread.
The Valley News Dispatch transmitted the photo to AP, which was seen worldwide the next day. John Filo, shooting for The Valley News Dispatch won the Pulitzer Prize in photography. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young later penned the anti-war song, "Four Dead in Ohio."
VIETNAM, 1968
Eddie Adams
He was a photo enthusiast as a young man and turned that enthusiasm into a career, first working for the New Kensington Daily Dispatch, which later merged with the Tarentum Valley News to become the Valley News Dispatch.
Eddie later worked as a war photographer in Vietnam and shot the photo in 1968 of a South Vietnamese military officer executing a Viet Cong prisoner. It's a photo that you can't forget once you've seen it because of its sheer brutality. I read stories about the photograph, long before I became a newsman myself. As I recall, Eddie said he turned away immediately after taking the photo.
He won a Pulitzer Prize in photography in 1969 and continued his prolific career in photography before succumbing to ALS (Lou Gherig's Disease) in 2001. He is buried in Lower Burrell, Pa., near his hometown. The New Kensington Camera Club holds an annual exhibit of his photos. I'm going to try to make it to this year's exhibit.
I worked at The Valley News Dispatch for several years in the 1990s, and one of the longtime editors told me about the John Filo photograph. Later, he talked about Eddie Adams, describing him as "quite a character." He was smiling when he said that, and I took it to mean that Eddie was fun and colorful and had a lot of stories to tell.