Word: bache
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...Bach's protégés, most of them poor and obscure at the start, have snapped some 100 LIFE covers in all. At one time nine Bachians were on the staff of LIFE (Bob Landry, John Florea, Mark Kauffman, George Strock, Hank Walker, John Dominis, Peter Stackpole, Harold Trudeau, John Wilkes). West Coast newspapers are full of Bach alumni; others are aiming the nation's TV and newsreel cameras. In World War II, 146 were combat cameramen, and four died in action. What Harvard's George Lyman Kittredge was to Shakespeare, Fremont High...
Take a Chance. Bach came to his eminence-he got nothing more material out of it than $758 a month-by love and toil. Born in Hollywood, the son of a building contractor, he started as a carpenter. Hating it, he wangled a job as a "second cameraman" errand boy at the old Fox movie studios. In 1925, hunting security (he has a wife and four children), Bach tried to peddle himself to seven Los Angeles high schools as a photography teacher. He was coldly turned down everywhere except at Fremont High. "I'll take a chance," the principal...
Hired part time, Bach crammed a tiny photo lab into the auditorium dressing room. Soon "Bach's Boys" were rushing about, shoving big black boxes in students' faces and yelling, "Hold it!" Other teachers were shocked at Bach's brand of pedagogy: he encouraged playing hooky on sunny days-with a camera. "Go get the picture," he would say. Bach badgered officials into buying extra film, gave his budding photographers more than most daily newspapers allow their regulars. He ceaselessly sent his boys to football and basketball games to get realistic pictures (blur was just fine...
...Cover Eleanor." "All I ever demanded was results," Bach recalls, "and I got 'em." One reason was Teacher Bach's skill at spotting hungry boys with talent, most of them Depression kids with a drive to make good. For them, Bach's first aim was finding a fine camera: "In those days, it was like buying a diamond." Often Bach lent a boy the down payment out of his own pocket, persuaded a camera store to give him credit, found him odd jobs to keep up the payments. With a precision instrument in his palms...
Time after time, the payoff was extraordinary. One of Bach's students was shy, skinny, 17-year-old Mark Kauffman, owner of a rickety Speed Graphic and the sole support of his parents, two sisters and 14 brothers. "Go out and cover Eleanor Roosevelt," said Bach to Mark one afternoon in 1939. At a press conference, Kauffman snapped unobtrusively in the background, produced one of the most human, humorous pictures of the First Lady ever taken. A week later it adorned the cover of LIFE, and Kauffman...