From The Vault Of Art Shay: Getting The Cover

(January 1977) I remembered giving the guy on this cover $20 to let me cover his face with a heavier layer of snow than the one already on it. Not for nothing was my nickname as a \<em\>Life\<\/em\> reporter, &#8220;DeMille!!!&#8221;\r\n

Two great \<em\>Life\<\/em\> photographers came to Chicago to shoot the Bill Veeck scoreboard which lit up with fireworks at home runs. Working without an assignment and knowing the 4th of July was on hand I importuned my pal Veeck to let me set up my 4x5 Linhof view camera in a hanging box along the first base line. I also talked him into shooting off his leftover fireworks at the end of the game. Minnie Minoso hit a homer in the third inning so I opened the shutter to catch the small burp of flame, then closed the shutter. When the game ended and Comiskey Park went dark I opened the shutter again on my 7-1/2 inch Voigtlander lens and then Veeck\'s assistant turned the sky orange with leftover fireworks... and I got my first cover on \<em\>Sports Illustrated\<\/em\> on spec! This cover made all the Time Inc. magazines and publications like \<em\>Parade\<\/em\>, \<em\>This Week\<\/em\> and \<em\>The Saturday Evening Post\<\/em\> aware of me, and they could save the roundtrip fare and hotel bills of a \"name\" fotog by hiring me.\r\n

(Carl Yastrzemski, 1967) When \<em\>SI\<\/em\> came along in 1954 I was the only one of my three or four competitors who had a complete set of long telephotos—even the redoubtable Novoflex 560mm f:9. I had amassed the long lenses covering the Mafia. My first of 827 pictures in SI was with the 560 mm Novoflex, shooting Notre Dame coach Ara Parseghian cross field right through a mess of linemen gladiators. When Yastrzemski, playing for Boston, came up in Cleveland, there I was with my Novoflex 400 as he homered.

The 1959 Pan-American Games saw Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley playing a Spanish harp on the hustings and the entire company of the Mexican Ballet Folklorico dancing all over town. There was such jealousy in this troupe that the girl on the cover complained to her \<em\>jefe de seguridad\<\/em\> that a rival dancer had laid a curse on her head if she made the \<em\>Life\<\/em\> cover. She made it and went on to great laurels. This was the first of my only two \<\/em\>Life\<\/em\> covers. The second was in 1966 of a piece of evidence with murderer Richard Speck\'s fingerprints on it being carried through the DAs office.\r\n

(Earl Young, 1961) Shooting from the back of a station wagon I nailed Olympian Earl Young while traveling at his exact speed down the track.\r\n

(Dan Gurney, 1963) Gurney was the first driver to win races in Sports Cars (1958), Formula One (1962), NASCAR (1963), and Indy Car (1967)\r\n

(Hornung & Taylor, 1966) This is the left half of \<em\>SI\<\/em\>\'s first fold-out cover. The right side contained Grabowski. (Any Wisconsin kid could tell you the name of he other guy.) The day of this shoot the late unlamented North Central airlines departed from O\'Hare 12 minutes early! I had to rent a plane to make my shoot. In all my years working for them, Time Inc . never rejected such an expense account item. Helicopters, police bribes, outlandish taxi fares—they realized the importance and priorities of covers. Someplace in its files SI has my and it\'s suppressed picture of a high school girl climbing down a ladder out the training camp window of a Green Bay Packer lothario at 6 AM. Nobody wanted to get shot by an irate Packer fan or player.\r\n

(James Van Allen, 1959) At the University of Iowa, the discover of the Van Allen belt that girds celestial bodies, drew his brilliant young son into my picture for the main story. Allen tried to explain his \"belt\" to my unscientific ears, with the kid filling me in! Both were wonderful teachers. Many magazine covers are Norman Rockwell-type drawings by a stable of great cover artists who often worked from photos of mine. This was pleasantly galling. I first became aware of this anomaly when four of my photos were hung at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. There in the next hall was an award winning \<em\>Time\<\/em\> cover \"by\" Chaliapin, one of their talented cover artists. Every line of Vince Lombardi\'s face, every article of clothing, was from my Rolleiflex frame that long ago Sunday in Green Bay. My wonderful archivist Erica de Glopper (whose skilled hand has gathered just about every one of the pictures in my Chicagoist career) has been getting some of these images together.\r\n

(Charles Schuman, 1965) Shuman was head of the National Farm Bureau when farming still had many small landholders. My happiest memory of our shoot: I had my genius son Harmon, 17, along and Shuman was showing us a problem he was having mixing various types of grain as they came down long pipes from his blue silos. \"Moisture slows the flow at the mixing box,\" he complained. Super-inventive Harmon (who had won four science fairs) drew on a \<em\>Time\<\/em\> caption sheet. He had sized up the problem and solved it by designing a series of strategically placed electric fans to go inside the grain boxes to keep the grain swirling and dry. Somewhere I have the thank-you note from Shuman. Harmon would be murdered in Florida, two weeks before his 21st birthday. It was the time of the Hippies and we\'ve never received a body or part of one. My lost dream of a son. When he was 15 in 1966 he built a computer that wrote 200 random words of poetry.\r\n

[Warren North (From \<em\>Time\<\/em\>: At 5:30 one frosty Indiana morning last week Farmer Warren North, 45, rolled out of bed to get at his chores. After a hearty breakfast—orange juice, cereal, bacon and eggs—he left his twelve-room white frame and fieldstone house, walked briskly to the barnyard. In the early morning mist the low-lying white barn, surmounted by five giant blue-black silos, rode the frozen prairie like an ocean liner. Like a rumble of surf came the hungry bellowing of 400 white-faced Herefords and the grunting of 500 Hampshire hogs, waiting at row...)]\r\n

(Ancel Keys, 1961) My first \"art\" cover at the University of Minnesota.\r\n

(Vince Lombardi, 1962) The Chaliapin picture hanging at the National Portrait Gallery next to the room with my photos of Hefner and Durocher. (Andy Griffith and artist Robert Crumb would be added through the years.)\r\n

(Archie Manning, 1970) Here is the \<em\>pater familias\<\/em\> of the great Manning quarterbacks. 600 mm Nikon lens.\r\n

(Dan Reeves, 1967) Famed coach Dan Reeves was a famous player first.\r\n

(1982) My favorite cover! My younger daughter Lauren—recently a grandma—and journalist husband Carl Lavin on their wedding day in Chicago. Lauren went on to become a distinguished fotog. Carl began as a Sun-Times reporter, then a New York Times editor for 20 years. He just becane CNN\'s home page editor in Atlanta. One of their four children, Seth Lavin, deduced Dan Sinker as the person behind the @MayorEmanuel Twitter account. It was Carl\'s journalistic skepticism over my egotistical remark that \"it feels like I\'ve done 1000 covers\" that set me to counting my covers! I had done more than 50 for \<em\>Medical World News\<\/em\> and about the same for \<em\>National Racquetball\<\/em\>, 25 for Blue Cross publications and covers for 60 of my own books. And 3 recent ones of the nude Simone de Beauvoir... they add up.\r\n