My favorite Red Huber story is from his first two weeks at the Orlando Sentinel. Red settled into a new staff position with great ease. His personality fit right into the photo staff whose attitude bordered on irreverence and enthusiasm pushed all of us to never admit we could make a mistake.
We shot color transparency every day, ran one column color mugs of rockets lifting off from Cape Kennedy and trampled over Mickey Mouse’s over-sized shoes as Disney began to change the landscape of central Florida.
We also traveled to Cuba, stepped between war protesters and police officers, and flew cross country for the release of Vietnam War POWs.
Red stepped into the photo maelstrom without causing a ripple and went about his job with great ease. it certainly didn’t hurt that he had a great laugh that followed a broad smile although he was a little shy being the new person on staff and still learning the ropes.
Red had been hired by then-photo chief Gene Blythe who left for a job with the AP the same week Red arrived. They hardly got to know each other before Gene was gone and Red settled into our cadre of never fail photogs. It was several weeks later that Gene, now working at the Miami AP bureau, received a call from Red. He’d been too embarrassed to ask the interim photo chief a question. The interim chief was the object of scorn by most of the photo staff because he was not a photographer. He was the assistant librarian in the paper’s morgue.
It seems Gene, in the haste to leave, had forgotten to file the paperwork for Red to get paid. The personnel department had no record of Red. He didn’t exist as a staffer. Of course, he’d been issued company cameras, had a company ID, drove a self-insured company car, and used the paper’s authority to step into people’s homes and businesses for photos.
Red had been having such a good time he didn’t notice he wasn’t getting paid until the bills weren’t getting paid. I’m sure Red now gets a regular paycheck.
Read more about Red in this 1998 piece at Digital Storyteller. That’s Red in the photo at top installing camera remotes at a Space shuttle launch. Also check out a multimedia piece with Red at the Orlando Sentinel’s Photo Channel.
No Comments so far
Leave a comment
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
