By Donald R. Winslow
BLOOMINGTON, IN (May 31, 2007) – The former chief photographer for The Herald-Telephone and The Herald-Times, Larry J. Crewell, died Sunday May 27 in Bloomington, IN. He was 70 and retired from the paper in 1992 after more than three decades of service. When he started at the paper in 1958, he was the only photographer on staff. When he retired he was the paper's chief photographer.
I grew up in Bloomington, and Larry Crewell was the first newspaper photographer I met as a child and the first newspaper photographer I saw doing his job. In 1963 my fourth-grade class took a field trip to the fire department. After they gave us the station-house tour, we were posed on the rear of the largest fire engine as it stuck out the station door into the street, and "the man from the newspaper" patiently waited to take our picture. The next day there it was, in black and white in The Herald-Telephone, with a caption that was bigger than the picture (because it named every single one of the kids, in order, left to right, with our names spelled correctly). I was very impressed.
Many people might recognize Crewell from the movie "Hoosiers" starring Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey, and Dennis Hopper. With a Speed Graphic and flashbulbs, in a sports coat and tie, Crewell played the role of a 1950s newspaper photographer during the 1985 filming of the championship game scenes for the hit film. The movie was written by another Bloomington resident, Angelo Pizzo, who also grew up in Bloomington and as a child saw Crewell's photos gracing the pages of the Herald-Telephone every day. As the story goes, Crewell was on the set photographing Barbara Hershey when someone frustrated by the Speed Graphic yelled out, "Hey, does anyone know how to work this camera?" Crewell stepped forward, having used that camera daily for many years – and as they say in Hollywood, the rest is history.
Crewell didn't look all that different in the movie – which was loosely based on the 1954 basketball season – than he did in everyday life, because he wore his hair short for most of his life, except for that bit in the 1970s, and most often he just looked like a guy from the 1950s anyway. The only difference was that in the movie he had a 4x5 instead of his ever-present 35mm Nikon F.
In the days before the Internet, and before small towns had their own television stations, the little local newspaper was the source of all local information. The Herald-Telephone had a wonderful tradition on election nights. They opened the newspaper and the newsroom to the public. They covered one entire wall in the first big room by the front entrance to the building with white paper and drew big charts. One of the reporters on a ladder with bright markers would write vote totals for each precinct as the results from various polling places were phoned in. The newspaper served coffee and donuts, and the public, looking like a Rockwell painting, stood in rows staring at the numbers appearing on the papered wall. Larry Crewell set up a couple of light stands to make the room brighter, and photographed the people watching the vote totals grow through the night in a newsroom that, for the evening, was part of some larger civics lesson come to life. Even the candidates would show up at the H-T. (What better way to get your picture taken?) The newspaper the next day would be full of pictures of the winners and the losers and the people who voted for them, folks who had gathered at the newspaper to watch the outcome.
Today all that seems like a scene out of a novel or a movie. It was back when newspapers were absolutely vital to the day-to-day life of a community, and when getting your picture in the paper was actually a really, really big deal. Hokey? Now some people would see it that way. But back then, it carried with it a genuine aura of importance.
In the 1970s when I was in high school, there Larry Crewell was again. At every Bloomington High School and University High School football game and basketball game and baseball game, at some point you'd see Crewell arrive, make a few pictures, then leave for his next assignment. The very first time I saw a telephoto lens, it was in Larry Crewell's hands. Not only did he let us look at it, he let us put it on our own Nikon camera body and look through it. I think it's fair to say I was somewhat awestruck. Then Crewell would shoot the game, and the next day there would be a really good photograph in the paper, and I'd wonder how he could do that every time he shot a game. I was convinced it was some kind of magic. He was a very creative photographer. He looked at things with his camera differently than we were used to looking at the world with our naked eyes. His pictures, almost all of them made in a small town and almost always about the everyday details of small-town life, were visually challenging. The folks in town would say that Crewell was "artistic."
When I started taking pictures in high school for the newspaper and yearbook, sometimes I got to sit on the end of the court or stand on the sidelines near him. I didn't realize it so much then, but thinking back on those times now, I realize that he treated us student photographers with a certain amount of respect that I'm sure we hadn't yet earned. Our pictures, next to his the next day, were clearly no competition, not even in our own hopeful eyes. Clearly, we had a lot yet to learn. But Larry Crewell never treated us with that attitude. He was usually a quiet guy, listening and looking instead of chatting. But if there was something good happening, or about to happen, he'd point it out to us so that we wouldn't miss it. Still, his picture of it would be better than ours. There's no way to tell how many young photographers called Larry Crewell their mentor. What I do know is how nice he was to each and every one of them.
More than anything, Larry Crewell loved to shoot sports. Besides the two high schools in town, there was Indiana University football and basketball. Hoops were always popular with us Hoosiers, but it was made even more interesting when a new young coach, Bobby Knight, came to town. More media attention meant more photographers sitting on the court, including Sports Illustrated's big guns, but Larry Crewell was always the dean of the crew, photographing IU basketball during the good years and the lean years, and doing a book about it with H-T sports editor Bob Hammel during the 1981 NCAA Championship season. Knight would actually speak to Crewell and be somewhat civil to him – which was not something we saw very often with the rest of the media.
For some reason Knight was a kinder, gentler Knight with Hammel and Crewell than he was with the rest of the press. He generally didn't hold the media in high regard in those days, and that hasn't changed much over the years. But he seemed a lot nicer to Larry Crewell than he was to the rest of the shooters. Maybe it was because Coach had some kind of respect for the fact that he was the guy from the local paper who was there day in, day out, in good times or bad times, doing his job. Or maybe, I like to think, it was because Larry Crewell was just such a nice guy that even folks like Bobby Knight could see that in him and act accordingly. Or maybe, like me, Coach looked at the paper every day and respected Larry Crewell for what he was able to see, for his imagination, and for the talent he had with a camera that let him share his vision with us all, day after day, in a rather small newspaper in rather quiet Midwestern college town.
Larry’s son, Chris, followed in his dad's footsteps as a newspaper photographer for a while before leaving the profession. Chris was a staff photojournalist with the Sacramento Bee until about five years ago. Crewell's daughter, Lori, and his wife, Wilma, and Chris all survive him. I have no idea how many thousands and thousands of people Larry Crewell photographed in all his days as the H-T's photographer, but I know that every day's newspaper, every section, had pictures in it that he'd taken. Even as a kid I realized he must have worked a lot of hours, and driven a lot of miles, to do that every day, year after year. After I left Bloomington for the last time, in the 1980s, and started working for a series of larger newspapers, I never got a chance to go back and visit the H-T or to see Larry after he retired. But when I think about how I got interested in photography, and the first time I ever met "the man from the newspaper," I'll always fondly remember Larry Crewell.
