Working for National Geographic: The Challenges & Opportunities

It was a heady time for a boy who grew up in the woods to arrive in the nation’s capital.

The Cold War was in full swing. The sign on every stairwell in National Geographic Headquarters, five blocks from the White House, read ”In case of nuclear attack proceed to the basement.”  Gradually, as staff photographers return from assignment, the names that I had revered so much growing up turned into real people.

Jack Fletcher took me into the electronics department and showed me how to set up and use the 10,000 watt electronic flash, a flash bright enough to light up a whole football field at night. It would become very handy later. Bob Sisson told me about the “good old days “when he was assigned to do a night photograph of a presidential inauguration coming along Pennsylvania Avenue. Told said he set up his camera on the roof of a high government building and filled the rain gutter with flash powder. He said when the parade arrived and he took the picture, “Never had Pennsylvania Avenue seen such a huge explosion, nor had I seen such an overexposed negative.“ 

I did a number of local assignments and then returned the following year to do update coverage on the Ozarks. One day I had just returned from some kind of an assignment. My phone rang. It was the Director of photography from National Geographic who asked me to be at the National Airport in two hours. I was joining a team to photograph the funeral for Winston Churchill. My photographic equipment was always ready, but my clothing was at the laundry.  It was my first overseas assignment.  But it was far from the last.