WCAV-TV’s Meltzer Wins Yoder Award For Workshop

 

DURHAM, NC (January 9, 2007) – The National Press Photographers Foundation, Inc., is pleased to announce that Erik Meltzer of WCAV-TV in Charlottesville, VA, is the winner of the 2007 Gordon Yoder Award of $1,000 to assist with the expenses of attending the National Press Photographers Association's 2007 NPPA NewsVideo Workshop in Norman, OK.

Gordon Yoder Award chairman Edward Dooks made the announcement today.

Established by Gordon Yoder, who died in 2004, the grant is to assist a young, professional, and working television photojournalist to attend the annual television workshop. Yoder was a longtime NPPA member and winner of the 1994 Joseph A. Sprague Award, NPPA’s highest honor.

Dooks says that Yoder got a job at Jamieson Film Co. in Dallas, TX, in the fall of 1937. He had no professional experience and worked for free until the owner thought that he was good enough to pay a salary. That took two weeks. Yoder began shooting newsreel stories for Paramount News in 1943. When the Korean War broke out, Paramount sent him to Korea as a cameraman for the American Newsreel Pool. In 1952 he went to work for Telenews and worked for them sixteen years until they finally folded all news operations, Dooks says.

Yoder then formed Professional Cine Products in 1968 and later changed the name to Gordon Yoder, Inc. He made many improvements to the Cine Voice conversion, and designed and built motion picture equipment. His company sold and serviced a full line of professional motion picture equipment. By l977, tape began to appear in newsrooms and Yoder received an offer of a buyout in early 1978. Dooks says Yoder jumped at the chance and retired.

During his career, Yoder photographed all the U.S. presidents from Harry Truman to Richard Nixon, presidential inaugurations in both the United States and Mexico, the integration battles of the south, the landings of NASA astronauts Alan Shepard and John Glenn, and disasters – natural and otherwise – throughout the United States.

Yoder was known to say of his career many times, “I've never worked a day in my life – it's all been fun.”

More about the National Press Photographers Foundation can be seen here.

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