Babe Ruth, his haggard face revealing how seriously ill he was, bowing out of baseball in 1948. Adlai E. Stevenson displaying a large hole in the sole of his shoe during the 1952 presidential campaign. Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald to death in the wake of the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963.
What linked these news events was that they were captured in photographs which won Pulitzer Prizes. The pictures also became engraved in the mind as images of their eras.
When journalists and educators assemble at Columbia University next March to judge the “breaking news photography” entries for Pulitzer Prizes, a top contender will be a dramatic picture taken on Sept. 11 by Thomas E. Franklin, staff photographer for The Record in Hackensack, N.J.
The photo dominated Page A1 of The Times-Dispatch on Sept. 13 and appeared in newspapers around the world. With the rubble of the World Trade Center as background, three firefighters from New York City’s Brooklyn borough were shown raising a U.S. flag, a colorful symbol of life in a ghastly setting of death.
The Record called it “an image of hope.”
In an article in The Record, Franklin said he was about 150 yards away when he spotted the firefighters raising the flag. The rubble pile was about 100 yards behind them, but a long lens compressed the background and foreground in the picture.
Franklin said he just had flown in that morning from assignment in the Dominican Republic when an editor told him about the attack on the towers. He first shot pictures from a Jersey City vantage, then in the afternoon caught a tugboat to Manhattan and took more photos at “ground zero.”
He was walking in an evacuated area between 4 and 5 p.m. – police threatened to arrest him several times, he said – when he saw the firefighters and the flag.
“This was an important shot,” he wrote. “It told of more than just death and destruction. It said something to me about the strength of the American people and of these firemen having to battle the unimaginable.”
He immediately realized his shot would resemble the famous photograph of Marines planting a U.S. flag on Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima in 1945. That picture, by Joe Rosenthal of The Associated Press, won a Pulitzer.
Possibly, the similarity to the Iwo Jima picture could be an obstacle for the judges to Franklin’s winning a prize, too.
If Franklin’s photo does win, it would be the third Pulitzer in six years depicting firefighters. One winner showed a firefighter cradling the limp body of a baby girl after the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Another was of a firefighter rescuing a 15-year-old girl from swirling floodwaters in Sonoma County, Calif., in 1996.
After Franklin made the flag shot, he said he realized he was in a dangerous area. “Spread out in front of me was 200 yards of burnt-out cars, ambulances and firetrucks that were crushed and covered in soot. There was no color; everything was dusty white.”
Once the flag-raising photo had been scanned into the computer system at The Record and was on its way to publication, he wrote, “All I wanted to do was see my wife and son.”
The work got to him emotionally. “There were times during the day that I cried,” he wrote.
All of America cried, too.
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Editor & Publisher magazine reported early this month that requests for the flag-raising picture had poured in at The Record. An administrator in the marketing department there confirmed to me that the newspaper has received “around 10,000″ requests for prints, mostly by e-mail.
The Record said that, while commercial or charitable use of the picture was forbidden, it would allow personal use, at no charge, if permission were obtained from the newspaper. Those interested can log on to a Web site, www.northjersey.com, and follow the instructions.
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The T-D on Sept. 15 published an article quoting a teacher at St. Edward-Epiphany School here saying that one of the firefighters in the flag-raising picture was her younger brother, John Drumm. At the time, she hadn’t been able to speak with the brother in New York City.
When they made contact, she learned that wasn’t her firefighter brother. The man at left in the picture, observing the raising of the flag, bore a strong resemblance, and another family member had told her that was John.
“To me, that’s John,” said the teacher, Erin Drumm, of the man in the photo. “This guy’s his double.”
The three firefighters actually were Dan McWilliams and George Johnson from a Brooklyn ladder company and Billy Eisengrein from an engine company there. Jeannine Clegg, a reporter on The Record, interviewed them two days after the event and told me she had confirmed their roles.
McWilliams, she reported in her paper, had seen the flag flying from a yacht docked near the trade center. He took the flag and its pole back to a pile of rubble on West Street. Johnson and Eisengrein, both friends of McWilliams, joined him on the way.
They found another flagpole sticking up from a mass of rubble about 20 feet high. They raised the flag on that pole as Franklin, unseen by the firefighters, took their picture.
Johnson told the reporter he heard cries of support from fellow firefighters. “A few guys yelled out, ‘good job’ and ‘way to go,’” he said, and added:
“Every pair of eyes that saw that flag got a little brighter.”
