Word: bachli
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...pain, laying out the world before eager eyes. Sometimes they work alone amid squalor and risk; sometimes they haunt the watering holes of wealth. Wherever they are, some 300 artist-hustlers are likely to swap fond recollections of the quiet little man who launched them: Clarence A. (for Abel) Bach, 65, founder of the first U.S. high school photo-journalism course. Last week, after 34 brilliant years at Los Angeles' John C. Fremont High School, Clarence Bach retired...
...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...