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Come On, You Sea-Cooks
This World War I recruiting poster suggested that you could do worse than become a Navy cook. But, you could do better, too, as W. L. “Dick” Richardson, below, left, found out. A battleship cook from 1911 to 1914, when he became the first official Navy Photographer and, at Pensacola, took the Navy’s first aerial photograph, his “sons” and daughters would have made the erstwhile belly-robber proud.
Walter Leroy “Dick” Richardson was born in August 1899 and raised on a small farm in Massachusetts. His first camera was part of a photographic kit he purchased through the mail, and his first pictures were taken around the farm.
He processed and printed his own film, washing the prints in a creek. He completed high school and attended Becker’s Business College in Worcester before enlisting in the Navy as a Ship’s Cook Fourth Class on 1 November 1911.
Following commissary school and service in the galleys of the battleships Tennessee (BB-43) and Mississippi (BB-23), he was transferred to the Pensacola Aeronautic Station where, late in 1914, his hobby of taking pictures of flight school activities won him the designation of “Official Station Photographer. ’ ’
He became the undisputed “Father of Naval Photography”—which may be why an official Navy photographer is sometimes referred to as a “Son of a Sea-Cook.”
When he reenlisted in 1915, Richardson changed his rating to machinist’s mate (aviation) and, two years later, when he was transferred to Washington, D. C., to organize the Navy’s Photographic Section under the Bureau of Navigation, he had become a chief machinist’s mate. En route to
ington, he attended th® Ar"pang' al of Aerial PhotograP y jua-
ield, Virginia, and after 6 in
was commissioned an ■-
[aval Reserve Flying aI)d
April 1918, four ti'
udents were selected y jn(er','e'v ;xamination and person' end the first four-week N ^
, School at NAS Miam, ^ i graduation, most of d orders to Paulliac, the
more classes graduate ps
,f World War I and the s
ne officers and 87 retume<J
trained and most of jed,
/June i
'ne of th ■y'
ter ] n°Se w^° stayed was Chief
.51® Lyman
-achin ~J'uan E- Goodnight, whose e>(aiTlPle Sk*"S and *eadership-by-
lnterg,Wiau'<l inspire all those he en r na during his subsequent 32-
Di!._ 1aval
*lck R i„L* career- As handsome as Ison was homely, Good-
a,8ht vva!> nouieiy, uu
^’chardso transPorm h’s mentor
Ph,
acharck S°.n P*an” into reality.
hn,. ds°n S nlnn .
Of
‘°t0!
s plan was to train naval
igra , t 'un was l0 tram naval oto» 6rS t0 handle many phases
• Photon “anuie many pnases
nuntber HaPhy • Because of the small
'llOgj* J ’ utv(UlaC UI l lie SI
r,nd 8row..,PerSOnncl in ,he ratin8
Wor'd-wide demands, Qs°n WanhJ u: I . ,
Wanted his photographers
to be able to do aerial photography and motion picture photography as well as still photography, developing, and printing.
Richardson, who died just before the end of World War II, and Goodnight, who retired soon thereafter, lived long enough to see the plan pay handsome wartime dividends when Navy photographers—unlike their Army and Air Corps counterparts—could be transferred among squadrons, ships, or other units and were able to begin work immediately without specialized training.
In 1919, Navy photographers were spread very thin as they recorded the transatlantic flight of the NC-4, fleet
In April 1918, his culinary ambitions on the back burner, Ensign Richardson—facing page—posed at NAS Miami with the graduates of his first class of the Naval School of Photography. Thereafter, either leading a team of photographers or alone, he brought the Navy into sharp focus for his countrymen. One of his “boys,” Chief Lyman Goodnight, above, held school on the aerial oblique camera; or stalked the streets of Washington, D.C., in search of subjects with a fellow instructor; or was almost cropped out of the picture in favor of a “Lassie” look-alike at the relocated School of Photography in Pensacola, Florida.
Ce'dings .
** ' June 1986
maneuvers off Key West, and the passage of a new Pacific Fleet through the Panama Canal to San Francisco.
The $40,000 budget for 1920 permitted the opening of the photo school at Anacostia, Washington, D. C., but with no textbooks available, Chief Instructor Goodnight had to research material in the Library of Congress at night for the next day’s classes. But, the old calumny about teachers— “Them as can, do; them as can’t, teaches”—did not apply to either Richardson or Lyman. Brilliant, resourceful teachers, both, they were capital-D Doers.
The post-World War I years were busy ones for the pair and for the 250-
or-so Navy photographers. Having been designated a naval aviator in April 1918, Richardson had flown the first aerial mapping training flight in May. Consistent with his career-long policy of shooting everything that did not shoot him first, Richardson went to Key West in February 1919 to photograph submarines from a C-l dirigible. But weather conditions were so good that he shot a series on pigeon handling, another on Lewis guns, one on seaplanes dropping bombs, and another of a man making a thousand-foot parachute jump from a kite balloon during naval maneuvers. Later in 1919, he and his crew took pictures of the new Pacific Fleet passing through the Panama
1, of the subsequent flee'- "lSaerial
and, for the first time eve , ^ igraphs of San Francisc
area. sanded th£
1921, Richardson fonl^mbing age of the Army/Navy ^ unnery tests on eX . rged in ,
ship Ostfriesland. J head
he continued on as civil* n of
he continued on « aU -
photo section of the B , js capac' autics (BuAer) and, m jj,6 as one of the survivor® ° (Zg. af the dirigible Shenai ndaty ch took the life of thu„rv Lands'
Cn tOOK LI1C inv l
riant Commander Zac -or
. In 1932, he became 5 it,ofl st of BuAer and held t -
/ Ju,,c 1
0f while, Goodnight was having a ated fr °0c* days, too. Having gradu- Sch°oi 'he third class of the photo stayeci 0Sn was 'n Miami, he Hen t. n and moved up to Anacostia 'here, u6 Sc'10°l was reestablished ^'r8inia6 WaS 0ut over (-aPc Henry, tecord th ln with Richardson to Vers, -[ fj6 *a" °f shot during maneuver fleen '* Was on t0 Guantanamo to me f0], et activities in Cuban waters. ptOneer °Wln8 year, he worked with "tg stiu nava' aviator Mel Pride, shoot- ^d'culari11^ mot'on Pictures— if an-cst" ^ S*ow m°tion photography— NaVy-s ,.n" Sear experiments on the chalienlrst carrier’ theLangley. One nS assignment followed an
other, but Goodnight returned again and again to the classroom and, in 1927, he assembled the first photographic training textbook.
In the summer of 1923, the photo school had been transferred to Naval Air Station, Pensacola, where both a land and a sea plane were available for photographic training.
Toward the end of the 1920s, Lieutenant Commander Arthur W. Radford, who later became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, led a survey party which mapped more than 650,000 square miles of Alaska. Aerial surveys of China were made with aerial photographers logging more than 5,000 flight hours.
When the “War To End All Wars” ended and the Armistice Day celebrations were recorded, facing page, most of the wartime photographers departed. In the austere decade that followed, aerial photography advanced from lashing a motion picture camera on the bow of an HS-2 seaplane to mapping 650,000 square miles of Alaska in the summer of 1929. The Alaska Survey ended two days after the great Depression began, but, by 1936, enough money was available for the Pensacola school to equip its own RR-5 Ford Tri-Motor transport with modern vertical mapping cameras.
the eye, and said, ‘You-all get the bar, you a helper.’ ”
,,iai
In 1921, Chief Lyman Goodnight was assigned to the carrier Langley where he worked with both “Mel” Pride and the Langley's free-spirited Executive Officer, Virgil “Squash” Griffin. Goodnight recalled:
“It was quite a problem to swing the camera through a test run, and prevent that strong push-pull force of the handcrank from giving a jerky, erratic travel along the path of the plane’s landing. Repeatedly, I asked Lieutenant Commander Griffin for a helper, but he always said, ‘Goodnight, you-all don’t need any help. You’re doing alright. ... If you had a long bar fastened to the camera, couldn’t you hold it aimed right at the airplane all the way through?’ “Quickly I replied, ‘Yes, sir. But I could not be back at the end of the bar aiming the camera, and up at the camera driving a crank. I’d have to have a helper.’ He hesitated a moment, looked me right in
Two years later, Goodnight was gone, u ^ w'25 photographer who replaced him, Bill Murt a> still using a bar and a helper.
PHOTOGRAPHY
The class that graduated in March 1940 was less than half the size of Richardson’s first World War I class. But change was in the wind; a war had started in Europe and the Naval Expansion Act of 1940 would extend the class to nine months and increase the number of students to 60—and then to 100. And Lyman Goodnight, his arm now heavy with hashmarks, would be there to guide and so, too, for most of the new war, would Richardson. And the ranks of the sons of the sea cook would grow and their deeds would become legend.
During the 1930s, naval photography continued to expand. Antarctica was added to the continuing mapping and aerial survey missions in the Atlantic and Pacific. Photographer’s Mate First Class Joseph A. Pelter was awarded the distinguished service medal for his service with the Byrd expeditions. The first multi-plane reconnaissance mission was flown by a scouting squadron from the USS Saratoga (CV-3).
By 1939, the size of the school classes varied from two to six officers, from ten to 16 Navy enlisted men, and from two to four Marines. Classes convened in January and July of each year and, by the end of the six-month
course, the students nau uy, nc"
types of commercial photog ejelTien'
photography, motion Pict“f® ’aphy. an tary portraiture, aerial pno b aerial mapping.
• nf COUrSe'
Eemtor’s note■■ There l°JstoTyof
more—much more to jg42^‘ naval photography. Part >( •, an0^ of ‘ ‘Sons of a Sea-Cook, gn in
aspect—aerial Pll0t0‘nterP[li,iied 'n World War II—will be Pub,‘ upcoming issues of Proceedi g