The broken fusilage
of the Avianca plane.
Click to enlarge
Anyway, one night I'm in my dorm room watching TV with my roommate Greg Mips. The phone rings at about 10:45 p.m. and it's the Pioneer's managing editor, Josh Margolin. "There's been a plane crash," he tells me, "get down here right away." So I tumble out of bed (I was on the top bunk) and gather up my camera and some film. I stop upstairs to get my assisstant editor, Bill Gropper, and we head up to the office.
Once we get there, we get some details: an Avianca Airlines plane crashed in Glen Head from Bogota en route to Kennedy Airport. Josh intended to do a special issue, so Bill and I had to go out and get what we could while the news editor, Jody Schwartz, worked on the story. Was there any need for us to produce a special issue? Certainly not. But it was an exercise in breaking news journalism that turned out well for this student.
Bill and I (yes, we were often referred to collectively as 'Bill and Ted') first went over to the North Shore University Hospital where many of the wounded were taken by helicopter. The place was eerily quiet. There wasn't a soul to be seen. Big, empty press conference rooms and parked helicopters were all that we found.
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So we headed down to the Nassau County Medical Center, which was similarly quiet. Our last stop was an attempt to get into the actual crash scene. With nothing more than some vague directions and the name of the Nassau Police Department community relations director (who assured us we could go in), we drove over to Glen Head.
Sure enough, the biggest hassle was parking my car. We had to stop almost two miles from the crash site and walk. It was raining and cold, but I was excited and it didn't bother me much. We got qued up with the rest of the legitimate press and were among the first group that the police led out to the crash site. It was a pretty amazing view. The plane was broken into a couple of large pieces and then many, many smaller bits shattered about.
Looking up, we could still see bits of clothing that had been torn off by tree limbs. It is the scale of the whole scene that sticks with me. We've all seen airplanes the size of passenger jets flying overhead or sitting on a runway through a terminal window. But seeing how the body of the plane dwarfed the surrounding trees was quite a sight.
So we got our shots and went back to the office, developed them, and printed a pretty impressive special issue. By 10:30 a.m. that morning, there were three papers on campus with reports of the crash: The New York Times, Newsday and the Pioneer. Only the Pioneer had pictures.
It wasn't until May that I started looking for a summer job. The co-op program at Post set me up with an interview at Fortune Magazine, for some kind of editorial assistant. The HR person I spoke with, Jackie Coleman, told me immediately that I wasn't qualified for the position, but that it's Time Inc. policy to interview everyone who applies through HR. Figuring I had wasted my time, I just discussed my school experiences with her.
As it turns out, Jackie was talking grad courses at Post and saw the special issue. She was very impressed with the whole thing, and got excited when I told her that I had taken the front page picture. "So would you be interested in a photography-related position," she asked me. Most definately. "Are you interested in sports?" was her next question. This was getting even better. She told me that there was a temporary job (we called the green-reqs, after the form that hourly temps had to file every week) in the Sports Illustrated Picture Collection.
I took the job for the summer, and as my lucky streak continued, a part-time permanent job opened up just as I was preparing to go back to school. PC deputy director Kathy Doak (now the Director) took a big chance on an eager 19-year old and I've been at SI ever since.