The Life Magazine Cover

Fifty years ago this month, Charles Whitman ascended to the open visitor gallery of the University of Texas campus tower and began a 96 minute sniper assault that eventually ended the lives of 16 people, wounded 30 more, and went down in history as the worst mass killing on US soil, a record of dubious distinction that lasted for another 20 years.

 Fifty-year anniversaries bring out retrospectives and special newspaper sections and memorial ceremonies, and that has been true for this horrific event. And one of the photos that has been reprinted was this iconic Life Magazine cover. I have no connection to the events on the UT campus that day, but I do have a link to the man who took that picture.

Two years earlier, the company I was working for was heavily involved in an exhibit at the New York World's Fair, promoting the churches of Christ. Part of the involvement was fund-raising to pay for this expensive exhibit and we produced a lot of promotional material to that end.

Shel Hershorn was a free-lance photographer based in Dallas and already had a very notable and respectable portfolio of journalism-related photography, most particularly those related to the Kennedy assassination a year earlier. Shel's assignment for us was to come up with some great photos of the exhibit and activity there, along with more "arty" photos of the New York City area as well. I was there at the time with a crew filming movies of the same general subjects.

This was my first experience working with a professional photographer, and I recall being astounded that a one hour walk-about in the Bedford Stuyvesant area of the city could result in 50-60 rolls of exposed film, from which we eventually picked 4 photographs.

Shel Hershorn was a free spirit, once described by his friend Gary Cartwright as "having the guts of a bugler." Bedford-Sty was not a desirable part of New York City at the time, and the citizens there were not all that enamored with having their pictures taken, but Shel ignored the stares and snarls, if not the down-right threats, and took the pictures he wanted.

After he took the famous tower picture through the Sheftall's Jewelry store window, he saw another photographer from a competing news service angling for the same shot, so Shel kicked the glass out of the window before he could get the shot, telling the irate manager, "Don't worry, Life Magazine will pay for a new one."

Then, as if on a whim, and at the pinnacle of his career, four years later he dropped out of photojournalism, bought a van, children’s Western clothes and a pony, emulating a previous generation of itinerant photographers who photographed kids in cowboy garb sitting astride a pony. He headed west but made it only as far as Taos, where he  re-created himself as a furniture maker and lived a rustic lifestyle without indoor plumbing in Taos, N.M., and, finally, in Gallina, N.M.

In 1996, he donated his extensive collection of negatives, photographs and papers to the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin.

Shel Hershorn passed away at the age of 82 in September, 2011.