Herald Examiner photographers reflect on the good ol’ days

Nick Souza doesn’t remember developing the film of what he considers his most noteworthy front-page photo. He doesn’t even recall printing the image. What he does remember is “standing on a giant ladder in the middle of Broadway” to photograph co-workers lined up in front of the old Herald Examiner.

“I quickly snapped some photos of the editors, reporters and photographers that ended up being run six columns wide,” he said, “with the headline: ‘So Long, L.A.’”

A generation has come of age since the death of Hearst’s Los Angeles Herald Examiner on Nov. 2, 1989, a digital generation that has no memory of The Times’ scrappy competitor. Once the nation’s largest afternoon paper, the Herald was a victim of changing lifestyles and a long, bruising strike, a publication that was losing about $2 million a month when it folded.

FOR THE RECORD:
Herald Examiner photos: A column in the May 13 Section A about a reunion of Los Angeles Herald Examiner photographers said that the Los Angeles Public Library had scanned about 90,000 images from the defunct newspaper’s archives and placed them on the Web. In fact, the library’s online collection of 90,000 images contains about 10,000 pictures from the Herald. In addition, the article referred to a photograph of O.J. Simpson carrying the Olympic torch up a hill in Pacific Palisades in 1984. Simpson carried the torch up the California Incline in Santa Monica, which is straddled by Palisades Park. —

Today, the Herald’s pages are preserved on reels of microfilm, accessible only to those willing to make the trek to the Los Angeles Public Library or other research facilities.

But the newspaper’s photos have found new life online. The library has scanned about 90,000 images from the Herald’s 2.2 million pictures and placed them on the Web, with hundreds added each month, becoming one of the Internet’s primary resources on Los Angeles history.

Former Herald photographers may be surprised by their newfound recognition, but as photo curator Christina Rice said at a panel discussion in March: “You really are rock stars for those of us who work with the collection.”

The panel, called “L.A. in Focus: Tales From the Los Angeles Herald Examiner,” was a boisterous reunion of Herald alumni and a bittersweet reflection on what it was like to be a photographer at the time — especially a Herald photographer.

The equipment in those days was strictly for black and white: 36-frame rolls of Kodak Tri-X film shot with Nikon 35-millimeter cameras and printed on 11-by-14-inch sheets of Kodabromide paper on the theory that oversize prints would convince page designers to give them bigger play. Unlike today’s digital cameras, there was no way for photographers to know if they got the shot until they went back to the office and processed the film.

The Herald photographers were diverse before diversity came of age: Latino, Asian American, African American and women, sometimes cooperative and sometimes competitive, united by one goal: “Beat the L.A. Times.”

James Ruebsamen, who was hired in 1981, said: “We’d have one photographer out there and The Times typically would have anywhere from four to six photographers. Our chief Jim Roark simply told us ‘When you come back, you had better have something better than the whole bunch.’ And that was our challenge. We didn’t make any money, but we sure had fun, and we challenged ourselves and we challenged The Times. The Times was probably the best thing we had going for us. It made us better photographers than maybe we would have been.”

The photo staff was young and fairly green. Anne Knudsen, who started in 1979 as an intern, said: “They made sure they got the cheapest, most inexperienced college students, who had no business being photographers at a major metropolitan newspaper covering world-class news. It gave us this opportunity that was incredible.”

What they saw through their viewfinders was Los Angeles from the late 1960s to the ‘80s: The Whittier earthquake, the crash of an Aeromexico jetliner in Cerritos, the Lakers with Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the Rams and the Raiders. Don Ameche and Cher at the Academy Awards. The Grammys with Michael Jackson or Whitney Houston. Evel Knievel, the Rolling Stones or Van Halen at the Coliseum. Charles Manson and his followers. Anti-tax crusader Howard Jarvis. Riots, fires, floods, car wrecks, the LAPD. And lots of plane crashes.

The 10 photographers on the panel, plus those who were on assignment like Souza and emailed their recollections, described taking some of their most memorable pictures: Campaign photo ops with Ronald Reagan, or Police Chief Daryl Gates going door-to-door in South Los Angeles. Gloria Allred at Chippendales. Raquel Welch not wanting to be photographed with a flash because she thought it would make her nostrils look too big. Eric Idle sitting on a toilet in a Hollywood hotel room with the rest of Monty Python peering from behind a shower curtain. Photographing “that tall guy” at a UCLA demonstration and discovering later that it was basketball star Bill Walton. Dressing up to photograph the Philharmonic and instead being sent by helicopter to Mexico to cover an earthquake.

And there were moments of terror.

Mike Mullen recalled photographing a 1979 riot at the Beverly Hills home of the shah of Iran’s sister, when the crowd overpowered police and tried to pull a female sheriff’s deputy out of a patrol car. “I’ve been a cop, I’ve been a soldier in Vietnam, and the most frightening thing in my life was right then, when they knew they had the upper hand and this frenzy took over,” he said.

For Ruebsamen, it was photographing Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda in 1985 after the team was eliminated in the playoffs. “As some of you may know, Tommy Lasorda is a rather crazy-type guy,” Ruebsamen said. “I thought, nobody has the guts to go into his office and take his picture, including myself. So I thought if nobody does, I’m going to try it.”

Hiding behind three writers who were standing around Lasorda’s desk, “I put the camera up, took one frame and just turned and I ran out the door.... I was glad I survived.”

Perhaps the most revealing picture was taken by Javier Mendoza, who started at the Herald when he was 23. It was one of his first assignments, taken during preparations for the 1984 Summer Olympics:

His picture captures O.J. Simpson carrying the Olympic torch up a hill in Pacific Palisades. “It was a magical moment that I got to cover,” Mendoza said. “We saw O.J. as a hero. He’s very heroic. If you look at the picture closely, everybody is looking at him.... He looks like a mythological hero, and he was at that time. He was the O.J. that won the Heisman Trophy. He was the O.J. that we saw on TV.”

But there’s more. “If you look closely in that picture, Nicole Brown is off to the left, running up the hill with him,” he said. Her sister Denise is also in the picture. “So I’ve grown to appreciate the picture for its historical significance, for the metaphor that it brings about who we perceive and the reality of who lies behind it.”

Former Herald photographer Rob Brown summed it up when he said: “The life of a journalist, I have always thought, is being on the front row to life. I think you have understood ... how special it is to be doing what we do for a living. It is a very special profession. Something none of us would trade.”

larry.harnisch@latimes.com