Trailblazing Photojournalist Caroline Valenta Dies February 20

Caroline Valenta

Caroline Valenta, a trail-blazing female newspaper photographer and Pulitzer Prize nominee, died on February 20 at the Westhampton Care Center in Westhampton. A former resident of Sag Harbor, she was 88 and had been battling pancreatic cancer for the past three years.

Born in 1924 in the small south-central Texas city of Shiner, she left the University of Houston near the end of her senior year in 1945 to work for a morning daily newspaper, The Houston Post, as a full-time staff photographer. Ms. Valenta, already employed part time by the paper, was told by the managing editor that she had to choose between taking an assignment for the paper or taking a final exam (the schedules of which conflicted) and be fired. She chose the job. Her starting salary was $25 per week. She was The Post’s first female staff photographer and the only woman in the photo department.

She began her career at a time when women were discouraged from covering “hard” news and, if employed at all, were encouraged to limit themselves to “society” news or the “women’s pages.” Within six months, she had taken photographs that won her national acclaim.

One, a news photo she took in October 1945, two months after the end of World War II, titled, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy”—depicting 1st Lieutenant Earl Pizzo, just back from a year’s duty in China, being greeted at Union Station by his 3½-year-old son, 2-year-old daughter and wife—was picked up by the Associated Press wire service and appeared in more than a thousand newspapers worldwide. It captured the joy of a soldier’s reunion with his family, even if his young children don’t quite remember him.

Many war-weary people at the time felt the photograph should have been used on a commemorative postage stamp because of its positive familial message and non-martial theme, but the U.S. Post Office rejected the suggestion because of their rule that no living persons could appear on a stamp.

“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy” was chosen by Edward Steichen, along with another of Ms. Valenta’s news photos, for “The Exact Instant, Events and Faces in 100 Years of News Photography,” an exhibition of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan in 1949. The exhibition, along with Ms. Valenta’s two images, featured pictures by photographic giants such as W. Eugene Smith, Weegee, Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Matthew Brady and Jacob Riis.

In 1947, Ms. Valenta garnered worldwide recognition for a series of pictures she took of the Texas City disaster, the deadliest industrial accident in U.S. history. The SS Grandcamp, a liberty ship filled with approximately 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate, caught fire and burned dockside for more than an hour before finally exploding with the force of a small atomic bomb. Destroying a wide swath of the Port of Texas City on the Gulf of Mexico, the fires and explosions killed at least 581 people, including all but one member of the Texas City fire department and injured 8,485 more, some of them severely.

The tremendous blast leveled nearly 1,000 buildings and sent a 15-foot wave that was detectable nearly 100 miles off the Texas shoreline. Ms. Valenta, in Houston 50 miles away when the initial explosion occurred, rushed to the scene in her 1929 Model A Ford (mileage, 272,000)—being waved through roadblocks by police and emergency personnel who recognized her car—with just seven film holders for her boxy, 9-pound Speed Graphic camera. That meant she could take no more than 14 exposures. She arrived at the disaster while smaller explosions caused by the first massive blast were still occurring and poisonous gas flooded the area. The resulting images were reproduced throughout the world, and one, of the skeleton of the Monsanto Chemical plant, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Life magazine ran that photo as the lead image in a multiple-page spread.

Her iconic image of Texas City was included in the book “Great News Photos and the Stories Behind Them” by John Faber. She considered it her greatest professional accomplishment and once said, “I don’t think I’d trade the [Texas City] experience for anything in the world. Maybe more time. But that would be it, if that. I felt really alive while walking among all those dead bodies. I was glad it wasn’t me lying out there. When I got there, there weren’t many [people] alive. It was like a Salvador Dali painting come to life. All dreamy like. I felt as if I had a big cloak or cape around me and the explosions couldn’t touch me. I felt safe, not part of it. Still, I was part of it, because I was covering it, but not part of it at the same time, because I was right in the middle of this great disaster but not affected. It was exhilarating. To be there and not be dead.” She was 23 years old at the time.

Ms. Valenta covered hundreds of accidents, crimes, fires, grisly murders and disasters as well as heart-warming “human interest” stories and celebrity features while working 80-hour weeks for years in Houston, a 24-hour-a-day, rapidly-growing, wide-open industrial city. Competing photographers at The Houston Chronicle and The Houston Press, both afternoon newspapers, nicknamed her “’Ol Blood ’n’ Guts” because she once picked up a man’s brains while helping some ambulance workers who were scrambling to pick up the pieces of two men killed in a catastrophic fuel-truck explosion. A colleague once introduced her as “the gal who would charge Hell with a bucket of water.”

She also worked extensively all over the United States while on assignment for the leading newsweeklies of the era, such as Life magazine, Time, Look, Fortune, Ebony and smaller-circulation periodicals.

“I remember the day I realized how fascinating and astonishing my mother really was. After all, your mom is your mom, and it’s hard to think of her as others might view her,” Grover Gatewood, who owns Iron Horse Graphics in Bridgehampton, said of his mother. “She was intelligent, funny, fiercely talented and absolutely fearless.”

Ms. Valenta moved to New York City in 1952 with her husband, Worth Gatewood, where she continued to work professionally for the New York Daily News and news magazines while raising seven children. In 1957, she photographed the birth of her own daughter Lillie, while giving birth—holding her Rolleiflex Twin-Reflex camera upside down and looking up at the viewfinder to compose her pictures. The contact sheet of nine square 120-mm images showing the progress of the baby’s birth is riveting, according to family members.

While on assignment, she photographed many notables such as future President Lyndon Baines Johnson (then a senator from Texas), the Duke of Windsor (who photographed her in turn), Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, bandleader Woody Herman, former Vice President John Nance Garner, aviator Charles Lindbergh, architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Phillip Johnson, golfing great Ben Hogan, and baseball’s enfant terrible, Billy Martin, and Hall of Fame superstar Stan Musial.

Once, assigned to photograph W. Averill Harriman, the former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union and Great Britain and then U.S. Secretary of Commerce under President Harry S. Truman, and a future governor of New York, Ms. Valenta knocked on his hotel room door only to have him answer it in bare feet, clad only in his blue boxer shorts. After she introduced herself, he replied, “Why, I had no idea they’d send a girl to take my picture. C’mon in and take a seat while I get dressed.”

She is survived by all seven of her children, Dr. Caroline V. Gatewood of Hampton Bays, Grover V. Gatewood of Bridgehampton, Gloria V. Gatewood Russo of Sayville, Lillie V. Gatewood of Greenvale, John V. Gatewood of California, Rosabelle V. Gatewood Naleski of Southold, William W. Gatewood of Illinois; two stepchildren, Boyd Gatewood of California, Louise Gatewood Horton of Texas; eight grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

Her husband, Worth Gatewood, a well-known newspaperman and former Sunday editor of the New York Daily News, died in 1998.

A funeral service was held at the Robertaccio Funeral Home in Patchogue on Tuesday, February 26. A book and exhibition about her life and ground-breaking career is planned.