Tom Herde, Award-Winning Boston Globe Photographer, 62
By Stan Grossfeld
Even near the end, the photographer’s body betrayed by lung cancer, his handwriting was still perfect.
It always was.
Nearly 40 years ago, Tom Herde was already an award-winning photographer for the Trenton (N.J.) Times and then the Star-Ledger, assigned to cover the State House in Trenton.
In an Internet world this sounds archaic, but each afternoon Herde would hand a package containing his developed film and handwritten captions to an Amtrack conductor passing through Trenton on the Metroliner heading up the Northeast corridor. He would then call Newark with the pickup info: “Davidson, third car from the end, 5:23 p.m.” and some kid would wait at Newark’s Penn Station, pick up the package, and slip the conductor $3.
I was that kid.
The pictures that he sent were the mark of a great photographer, able to capture something different from the day-in and day-out tired political scene. He was one of the most underrated photographers of his time.
A master of feature photography, his images were clean, dramatically lit, and well composed. No one made a better group portrait. In a world of motor-driven cameras, Herde shot frugally, thinking before he pushed the button. And his captions were always impeccably neat. Photographers usually have bad handwriting. Tom Herde was an exception to the rule.
So now summoned to South Shore Hospital by his telephone call asking me to write his obit, I dutifully obliged. Globe policy prohibits this practice. But a last request is a last request, so I brought a notebook and a tape recorder and greeted my old pal. Tom sat in a chair and growled at me to put everything away.
He couldn’t lift his head up but the red head was a feisty guy who did things his own way. But it was a generous way. He shared; he cared, more than anybody knew. But he had a rough exterior, honed from his days in Vietnam.
This would be the last time I would be working with the guy who first mentored me so as he sat there, the lucid mind trapped in the ravaged body, I remembered the first.
It was the high school state football tournament held in Atlantic City at Convention Hall in 1973. By the second day the sod in there smelled like the Jersey swamps.
Herde was a charitable teammate. He had the seniority to pick and choose locations but he sometimes let me shoot the winning side, which always got better display than the losers. After the championship game we loaded a big developing tank with our film in the darkroom, closed the darkroom and emerged into the light.
When we went to re-enter we realized the door was locked from the inside. The clock was ticking and everybody’s film was cooking inside.
Herde tried to pick the lock with a paper clip, he tried a credit card, he called security, maintenance, the AP photographer who annually covered the Miss America Pageant and just about everybody except Miss America. When the buzzer started blaring he reverted to his days in the U.S. Infantry in Vietnam. He kicked the door off its hinges. The championship film was saved.
Back in the hospital, Herde was listing his survivors on a piece of paper when he stopped and pondered his obituary picture.
Camera shy, he did not want it to be of him, even in the best of times.
“I know they’ll only have room for one,” he said. “How about Scituate Light?”
It was the picture of the last full moon of the century rising over Scituate Light. A classic. That picture was the best selling picture sold by the Globe Store, ever.
A feature photography master, Herde always had a celestial feel to his photography. This picture was a long telephoto shot that had Herde driving like a maniac and huffing and puffing on foot to line up the image perfectly. The moon moves quickly when you magnify it with a 500mm lens.
Herde won a slew of awards from the National Press Photographers Association, the Boston Press Photographer’s Association, the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and the National Football League. But his stunning work in his Massachusetts hometown of Hull, captured on his Web site Hullpix, is his most uplifting and scenic. His sister Susan wants to sell the beautiful pictures there to raise money for cancer research.
Now a nurse comes in to draw three vials of blood. Herde has her laughing before the first vial is full.
On the paper poised in front of him, Herde is writing "Bronze Star Medal – U.S. Army Infantry, Iron Triangle of Vietnam."
He never talked about that award given for heroic achievement against the enemy in combat.
“ I don’t want any embellishing,” he said. “I just want the facts.”
The facts are he doesn’t want to talk about ‘Nam. He was exposed to Agent Orange there, which one Beth Israel doctor felt contributed to his lung cancer. He started smoking in Vietnam and never stopped. Once when we were housemates down the Jersey Shore he fell asleep with a lit cigarette and woke up with his bed on fire. He calmly dragged it into the shower.
Truth be told, as is the case of many a good man, part of him died in 'Nam.
Later in life it gave him panic attacks that made it impossible for him to be in crowds.
A shy artful man with a voice gruff from the cigarettes, he did not want to blame the Army, or the U.S. government, although he was vehemently against the war.
Of his lung cancer he never complained.
“It was a self inflicted wound,” he said.
He stopped telling 'Nam stories 30 years ago but they are so haunting, they remain seared in the memory bank. When he was young, music could nudge the stories to the surface and so would booze. If “Time” by the Chambers Brothers or “Waiting For The Sun” by the Doors came on the stereo, Herde might be physically there – his face lit only by the glow off the tip of a lit cigarette - but mentally he was on the Ho Chi Minh Trail on a midnight watch, hoping for dawn’s early glow.
He never got married, never had kids, but loved his four nephews. He was a natural at photographing children. He let them be themselves and just waited patiently for the moment.
He had the most devoted sisters in Sue Robbins and Diane Smith. He also had a legion of fans. His longtime companion Harriet Johnson stayed loyal, ‘til the end, caring for him and bringing him chocolate Frappes from Friendly’s to supplement hospital food. He had a host of friends fixing meals, driving him to doctor’s appointments and caring for him in the sweetest of ways.
“He could be grumpy, but when you needed him, he was always there for you,” says his sister Sue. Both she and Diane had to fight to let them visit from New Jersey. He wanted them to remember him healthy. They kept a 24-hour vigil with him at home at the end.
Chemo never touched his full head of red hair. Cancer never got to his mind.
He still remembers the name of Heidi, a young girl who showed up wearing underwear on her head as we were shooting the Nantucket Windmill together at sunset in 1978.
When I told him his frame was better, he just smiled. He would never say so. He never wanted to show anybody up.
Another best selling Herde picture was captured the night Larry Bird’s number 33 was retired by the Boston Celtics in 1993. It shows a mischievous Bird ripping open Magic Johnson’s warm-up jacket to reveal a Boston Celtics tee-shirt.
Like Bird and Magic he was money in the clutch. When this photographer got a job in Boston in 1975, it was Herde who drove me to the Globe. He got there years later and made everything the Globe staff produced a little better with tips on printing, cropping, and shooting.
He hated socials, phonies, and office politics. He was more comfortable in a garbage dump in the Philippines then in any office. Wearing a tie was never an option.
He was happiest on the ocean in his antique wood boat, or cooking a gourmet meal, gardening, doing projects around the house or watching his New York Jets dismantle the Patriots dreams 28-21. One of his friends taped his “TH” initials on his photographer’s vest, for that last Patriots playoff game to honor him.
He wants his ashes scattered in Hingham Bay, the Jersey Shore, and the Delaware Water Gap, his favorite places on earth.
No funeral. No memorial service in a church. He wants a celebration of his life at his seaside Hull home. He just doesn’t want to physically be there.
“I’m not afraid to die,” he said. “Do you remember what it was like before you were born?” he asks. “Neither do I. That’s what I think it will be like.”
He says the battle against cancer has given him a chance to say goodbye. “Better than a heart attack,” he said laughing. He was surprised at how many people reached out to him with thanks.
“I felt the love,” he says smiling, before closing his eyes.
Tom Herde died Tuesday at home in Hull. He was 62.
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