57 Years of Presidential Photography and Stops Along the Way

By Darryl Heikes

While working for the Salina Journal I made a lot of feature pictures which I had done in high school. Reporting to work each morning, I would see what they wanted me to do. The two editors in charge would say, We dont have anything going onso go out and beat the bushes. I had roughly two hours to drive around and photograph, come back and develop the film, and give to the editors to see what they wanted. I then had to print the image and engrave it. Their comments were always the samenothing going ongo beat the bushes. I learned quickly how to find something to fill the hole on the front page without saying I could not find anything.

I had to fulfill my military obligation. Over a Christmas holiday in 1960 and January of 1961, I came back to work for the Journal until October. Charlie McCarty called me stating, We do not have a photo position but we have a reporting job in the Kansas City bureau and we would like for you to take it. Sounds great - quit the Salina Journal and drove to Kansas City where I saw Joe Galloway whom I had known from the UPI days. The first day of work the boss, David Otracker, told me that Vice President, Lyndon Johnson was coming to meet with Harry Truman. During the 1960 convention, Truman refused to go because it was thought it was rigged for Kennedy. Johnson was in town to soothe Trumans feathers. I went as a reporter and UPI sent me a photographer. I wrote the story about Johnson and Truman but did not photograph it. I stayed in Kansas City until they had an opening in Oklahoma City thinking this was a good place to be but was there only two weeks.

I learned there was an opening in Austin, Texas and went to work for UPI as a staff photographer at the Austin American Statesman. There was an arrangement between UPI and the newspapers purchasing the UPI telephoto network and Charlie McCarty included four photographers. The same arrangement existed at the Dallas Times Herald. When Felix McKnight was hired at the Dallas paper he brought all his people with him therefore changing the photo operations. Three UPI staffers worked for the Herald and this is where I was November 22, 1963. I photographed the Kennedys and Connollys at the intersection of Main and Hardware.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781499084764

Darryl Heikes

One of my first jobs after graduating from Kansas State College in 1960 was coming back to the Salina Journal where I had done freelancing in the summer and got a full time job in Sept 1960 with the Salina Journal. One of my first jobs was to photograph the handing over the keys of the missile silo system outside the city of Salina for $1.00. I went out to the site and made the photograph and tried to figure a way to photograph the missile. When I got there, I saw how far it was with no place to stand so I put a board out there. I took two steps on the board and was shaking so badly I had to get off. I never did make that picture.

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 by DARRYL HEIKES. 541144

   ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-5035-4641-7

      Softcover   978-1-4990-8477-1

      EBook   978-1-4990-8476-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 07/27/2015

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

Contents

MY TREASURED PHOTOS

THE DAY THE WORLD STOOD STILL

THE FIRST TIME I WENT TO THE WHITE HOUSE

TRAVELING WITH KIDS

MEETING PRESIDENT FORD

OUR FIRST TRIP TO CALIFORNIA

THROWN OUT OF THE OLYMPICS

The author would like to thank the many friends and family members who have over the years encouraged me to put stories to pictures. I especially want to thank my wife, Dell Heikes, who was a driving force behind the book.

We would like to thank Nan Sipe for all the hours spent editing this book. Also, Ann Hartman of Corbis for allowing me to have access to my Corbis images, Leslie Current and Karen Chevalier of U.S. News and World report. I can’t begin to express the love and appreciation for my daughter, Deidre Williams for the unbelievable amount of hours putting this book into chronological order, typing, editing, re-editing to see that this book published for her father.

What a life Darryl Heikes has lived! For a small-town boy from Salina, Kansas, to a globe-trotting news photographer, Heikes saw it all through his Nikon and Leica viewfinders. He photographed a dozen American Presidents from Harry S Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower onward.

He was snapping photos of President John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie in the motorcade in Dallas on that fateful day in November of 1963. In the days in Dallas after the assassination he shot the scene where Officer J.D. Tippit was slain by the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. He caught images of Oswald in handcuffs. He covered the trial of Jack Ruby, the man who assassinated the assassin.

I first met Darryl in 1961 in the Kansas City Bureau of United Press International. My bureau chief called me in and told me UPI had hired a brand new photographer out of the University of Kansas but while he was waiting for a photo job to open up in Lansing, Michigan, Darryl would be working as a reporter in our bureau-and it would be my job to teach him the ropes.

In short order Darryl was holding his own, and better, working shifts on the news side of a fast-paced wire service bureau, but he was truly relieved when the transfer to Lansing and his return to his first and only love, photography, finally came through.

During the course of nearly half a century as a shooter, Heikes photographed just about everything from college football to the Olympics in Mexico, Munich and Montreal; From the World Series in Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis and Minneapolis, to the Winter Olympics in Calgary. He flew around the world on Air Force One in press pools covering seven different American Presidents.

In the world of the wires, with their deadlines every minute, Darryl Heikes covered whatever his bosses assigned him to shoot, and he did it with a great eye, a kind heart and boundless energy and enthusiasm. He never missed, and he never bragged about how good he was or how good his pictures were – and he WAS good and his pictures were too.

Darryl covered his first President, Ike Eisenhower, when he was a 14-year-old sophomore shooting for his high school paper in Salina in the fall of 1953. Ike was making his first trip to his old hometown of Abilene, Kansas, after his inauguration as President. That assignment to cover a President made up his mind: He would become a professional photographer covering the highs and lows of America, the best and worst of our times.

He covered all those things, capturing images that marched across the front pages of a thousand daily newspapers worldwide, doing his part in weaving the intricate tapestry that told the stories of America in the 20th Century.

I’m proud to have had a small part in launching Darryl Heikes on his great adventure!

—Joseph L. Galloway

correspondent UPI/U.S. News/Knight Ridder Newspapers

Darryl Heikes has photographed all the American presidents in his lifetime beginning with Truman.

As a sophomore at Salina High School in Kansas, Heikes worked for the school newspaper taking photographs while studying journalism. With the school’s Graflex Super D 2 1/4 x3 ¼, he learned to shoot sports, selling his first photo of a high school football game to the Salina Journal.

His October 16, 1953 photograph of President Dwight Eisenhower waving from his open car in a motorcade through Salina, Kansas was published on the front page of his high school newspaper and the 1954 Trail the high school yearbook. He worked for the high school newspaper and yearbook selling photos of sports and features to the Salina Journal until graduation in 1956. He enrolled at Kansas State in September 1956 already working for the