Arnold Hardy, Pulitzer-winning photographer
Richard
December 7, 2007
The Associated Press
STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. --Arnold Hardy, an amateur photographer who won
the Pulitzer Prize for his photo of the nation's deadliest hotel fire,
has died. He was 85.
Hardy died Wednesday at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta of
complications following hip surgery, according to A.S. Turner & Sons
funeral home. His funeral was scheduled Friday - the 61st anniversary
of the fire.
Hardy's photograph of a woman plunging from a window of the burning
Winecoff Hotel in Atlanta on Dec. 7, 1946, became the defining image
of the fire - a disaster that killed 119 people and prompted
nationwide changes in fire safety.
Hardy was a 24-year-old Georgia Tech graduate student and lab
assistant when he took the photo.
His son, Glen Hardy, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution the
experience brought pain along with the fame.
"He stood on the sidewalk and watched people plummet to their deaths,"
his son told the newspaper. "He had almost a post-traumatic response
to that.
Hardy later turned down a job from the Associated Press, married and
founded a business that designs and manufactures X-ray equipment.
"The only pictures I've taken since then have been family and
vacations," Hardy told Atlanta newspaper in a 2000 interview.
The morning of the fire, Hardy said in the interview, he was returning
to his rooming house about 3 a.m. after a date. He heard sirens
screaming, called the fire department to get the location, grabbed his
camera and headed to the Peachtree Street hotel where 280 guests were
registered.
He had five flashbulbs - four after one of them burst from the cold.
He took three pictures. Then, with his final flash bulb, he trained
his lens on the mezzanine where bodies were bouncing on the awning and
striking the marquee. He noticed a woman who was trying to climb down
a rope and lost her grip.
Hardy captured her fall, her dress flying above her head and her white
underpants stark against the hotel. After developing the photo, he
called AP and sold the picture for $300.
"It wasn't just a lucky snapshot," his son said. "It was technically a
very complicated photograph to take. He had to consider lighting,
temperature. He was working hard to get that photograph, to capture a
moving object in pitch black darkness. He tweaked his camera to its
limits."
Hardy's son added, "One thing he took great pride in is that after his
photograph was published worldwide, fire codes were changed all over
the country and maybe the world."
Larc
| > Hardy captured her fall, her dress flying above her head and her white
| > underpants stark against the hotel.
|
| Good thing Britney Spears in that situation would *never* have to
| worry about getting her pic published [*].
|
|
| [*] or would she?
That would probably depend on whether she was facing the camera or not.
Larc
งงง - Change planet to earth to reply by email - งงง
MWB
Brad Ferguson
<8f947225-6ece-424b...@s19g2000prg.googlegroups.com>,
Richard <lcp...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Amateur who took Pulitzer-winning Winecoff fire photo dies
>
> December 7, 2007
> The Associated Press
>
>
> STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. --Arnold Hardy, an amateur photographer who won
> the Pulitzer Prize for his photo of the nation's deadliest hotel fire,
> has died. He was 85.
>
> Hardy died Wednesday at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta of
> complications following hip surgery, according to A.S. Turner & Sons
> funeral home. His funeral was scheduled Friday - the 61st anniversary
> of the fire.
>
> Hardy's photograph of a woman plunging from a window of the burning
> Winecoff Hotel in Atlanta on Dec. 7, 1946, became the defining image
> of the fire - a disaster that killed 119 people and prompted
> nationwide changes in fire safety.
Here's the pic:
<http://gtalumni.org/news/ttopics/win93/images/photographer.gif>
The story accompanying the photo is from the Georgia Tech alumni
magazine. It says that Hardy was arrested that night (but wait until
you see why), and it also gives the identity of the woman in the
picture. The story was written by a co-author of a book about the
fire.
<http://gtalumni.org/news/ttopics/win93/pulitzer.html>
Pulitzer Photo
Georgia Tech student was the first photographer at the scene of
Atlanta's worst hotel fire
By Sam Heys
Arnold Hardy was a 26-year-old graduate student at Georgia Tech the
night he heard the sirens roaring downtown from all directions. It was
1946, and he was living upstairs in a rooming house at West Peachtree
and North Avenue, within walking distance of Tech, where he was working
in both the research lab and physics department.
Hardy was still up at 4 o'clock on the morning of Dec. 7. After taking
his date home in Buckhead, he had waited an hour for a trolley back to
town. He had just taken his shoes off when he heard the sirens. An
amateur photographer, he hurriedly called the fire department.
"Press photographer. Where's the fire?" he asked
"Winecoff Hotel."
Hardy called a taxi. The cab picked him up and raced toward the corner
of Peachtree and Ellis. With his prized Speed Graphic camera and five
flashbulbs in his pocket, Hardy sprinted the final blocks.
He was the first photographer there.
The windows of the 15-story Winecoff Hotel were backlit by orange
flames. Guests -- jumping out of panic or falling from makeshift ropes
of bedsheets as they tried to escape the terrible smoke -- were landing
and dying on Peachtree Street. Amid the pandemonium and a cacophony of
sirens, Hardy went to work. He took a shot that spanned the front of
the building and the faces of the doomed in the windows -- the mutely
pleading, hopeless faces.
When he was down to his final flashbulb -- one had exploded in the cold
night air -- Hardy decided to try for a picture of a falling or jumping
guest. When his viewfinder found a dark-haired woman falling midair at
the third floor, her skirt billowing, he snapped the shutter open for
1/400th of a second.
With his photography completed, Hardy heard a fireman and policeman at
a drugstore across the street discussing calling the store owner so
they could obtain medical supplies. He told them to break the door
open. When they said they wouldn't he kicked it open himself. He was
quickly arrested.
As the Red Cross moved into the store to set up a first-aid station and
make sandwiches and coffee for the firemen, Hardy was led off to jail.
Upon being released on his own recognizance, he headed for the darkroom
at the Tech research search lab. He developed his film and struck out
for the Associated Press office downtown.
The AP offered him $150 for exclusive rights to his pictures. He said
he wanted $300 -- and got it. His final photograph -- the one of the
jumping woman -- would be reprinted around the world the following day,
and be on magazine covers for weeks. The fire had killed 119 people and
drawn international coverage as the worst hotel fire in the history of
the world. A few months later, Hardy became the first amateur
photographer to win the Pulitzer Prize.
The AP gave Hardy a $200 bonus the day after the fire, but he has never
received another cent for its frequent use. With the 47th anniversary
of the Winecoff fire approaching, Hardy's famous photograph is back in
the spotlight. It appears on the cover of The Winecoff Fire: The Untold
Story of America 's Deadliest Hotel Fire.
The book reports for the first time that the fire was set by an
arsonist. It also identifies the "jumping lady" for the first time. She
was Daisy McCumber, a 41-year-old Atlanta secretary who -- contrary to
countless captions -- survived the 11-story jump. She broke both legs,
her back, and her pelvis. She underwent seven operations rations in 10
years and lost a leg, but then worked until retirement. She died last
year in Jacksonville Fla., having never admitted even to family that
she was the woman in Hardy's photo.
The book also tells the dramatic story of James D. "Jimmy" Cahill, IM
'48, who became one of the fire's heroes. Cahill, now retired from an
academic career in Charlotte, N.C., had returned from the service and
was staying at the hotel while applying to re-enter Georgia Tech. After
escaping from the front side of the hotel, he raced around to the back
to rescue his mother.
Cahill entered an adjacent building and stretched a board across a
10-foot alley to his mother's sixth-floor room. He crawled across the
board and brought his mother to safety. Firemen quickly followed his
lead and, with Cahill's help, rescued many guests who had no other
escape from the backside of the hotel.
Hardy, a mechanical engineer, retired earlier this year, and sold Hardy
Manufacturing Co. of Decatur, builder of medical X-ray equipment to his
son. He retired from amateur photography decades earlier, shortly after
realizing his photos would always be measured against his Pulitzer
Prize winner. Hardy's goal that night had been to capture the futility
of the whole scene before him. "It upset me so much that of all those
trucks -- there there were about 18 in the front of the building -- I
saw only two nets," he said. "I thought to myself, 'I'd love to take a
picture that would just stir up the public to where they would do
something about this and equip every truck in the city with a net.'"
Hardy's horrifying photo accomplished much more.
The Winecoff did not have fire escapes, fire doors, or sprinklers, yet
had called itself fireproof. Quickly, fire codes changed nationwide.
The Winecoff became a watershed event in the history of fire safety.
The 119 did not die in vain -- their deaths made hotels safer for
Americans then and now. And the work Hardy did one night as a
26-year-old graduate student was one of the main reasons.
The Winecoff Fire: The Untold Story of America's Deadliest Hotel Fire,
by Sam Heys and Allen B. Goodwin (Longstreet Press, $19.95).
mack
"Brad Ferguson" <thir...@frXOXed.net> wrote in message
news:071220071845207669%thir...@frXOXed.net...
> In article
> Hardy's horrifying photo accomplished much more.
>
> The Winecoff did not have fire escapes, fire doors, or sprinklers, yet
> had called itself fireproof. Quickly, fire codes changed nationwide.
> The Winecoff became a watershed event in the history of fire safety.
> The 119 did not die in vain -- their deaths made hotels safer for
> Americans then and now. And the work Hardy did one night as a
> 26-year-old graduate student was one of the main reasons.
>
> The Winecoff Fire: The Untold Story of America's Deadliest Hotel Fire,
> by Sam Heys and Allen B. Goodwin (Longstreet Press, $19.95).
Interesting that some of the advances in fire safety come out of the worst
fire tragedies. The Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston in November 1942
resulted in the nationwide acceptance of outward opening doors in commercial
places, and the implementation of so called "panic bars" across doorways
instead of doorknobs, which will open automatically when the crush of
escaping people force the bars open and thus opening the doors.
The reason so many died at the Grove was that their bodies crushed up
against the inward opening doors with doorknobs.
Bill Schenley
>
> <http://gtalumni.org/news/ttopics/win93/images/photographer.gif>
>
> The story accompanying the photo is from the Georgia
> Tech alumni magazine. It says that Hardy was arrested
> that night (but wait until you see why), and it also gives
> the identity of the woman in the picture. The story was
> written by a co-author of a book about the fire.
>
> <http://gtalumni.org/news/ttopics/win93/pulitzer.html>
Very cool. Thanks for posting this.