Often referred to as the “best news picture ever made,” the 1937 photograph of the explosion of the Hindenburg dirigible in Lakehurst, New Jersey, is etched into the nation’s collective subconscious. We’ve all seen it, but most won’t know who took it. Fewer still may know that the photographer, Sam Shere, lived in St. Petersburg for nearly 20 years, continuing to ply his trade here and contributing to our fair city’s growing reputation as a land of perpetual sunshine.
Shere’s Story
Sam Shere was born in Minsk, Russia (today’s Belarus), around 1904 and was brought to America by his Orthodox Jewish parents. He grew up on New York’s Lower East Side with a hatmaker father who wanted his son to become a doctor. Shere didn’t enjoy school and took a job carrying the tripod for a cameraman, earning $1 a day, plus lunch. He soon picked up the camera himself. For more than a decade, he combined his love of photography with his love of the sea, working as a deckhand aboard oil tankers and as a freelance photographer during shore leave. He later was an on-ship photographer shooting passenger pictures on a transatlantic ocean liner. In 1934 he took a full-time job with International News Photo, part of the William Randolph Hearst publishing empire.
It was there that Shere first gained significant public attention for his work, capturing exclusive photos of the arraignment of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, kidnapper and murderer of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh’s 20-month old son. The attention would pale in comparison to that which one of Shere’s photos would receive three years later.
Shere was reluctant to photograph the arrival of the Hindenburg in New Jersey that day. By that time the 803-foot-long, self-propelled, steerable balloon (kept aloft with hydrogen gas, which is more buoyant than helium), had made 36 successful crossings of the Atlantic, carrying commercial passengers. Its arrival on May 6, 1937, in Lakehurst, New Jersey, should have been routine. Shere begrudged the assignment of shooting “celebrity style” photos of passengers exiting the craft. The landing, however, turned out to be anything but typical.
Disaster Strikes
The airship was hours late when it approached around 7:20 p.m. The bad weather that caused the delay lingered in the area, and daylight was fading quickly. The ground crew struggled to maneuver the ship to its mooring mast, when, seemingly out of nowhere, flames shot into the sky. Within 47 seconds of the first flash of fire, the Hindenburg lay in a smoldering wreck on the ground. Passengers and crew leapt from the gondola below the massive balloon in an attempt to escape the flames. Many survived but were horribly burned. Of the 97 passengers, 36 were killed, including the dirigible’s captain. Of the many photos that Sam Shere shot that day, the public would see only a handful; many others were too gruesome for public release. An audio recording by journalist Herbert Morrision became as famous as Shere’s photograph, with his tortured exclamation, “Oh the humanity!” becoming part of the American lexicon.
When asked later about capturing his famous photo, Shere said, “I had two shots in my big Speed Graphic, but I didn’t even have time to get it up to my eye. I literally shot from the hip – it was over so fast there was nothing else to do.”
Shere arrives in St. Petersburg
There were 22 newsmen on the scene that day, and dozens of other photos of the disaster exist. Sam Shere’s is the one that makes it into most compilations of the world’s greatest photos. What did Shere do with his fame? After taking many other notable photographs during World War II (including of the Atlantic Air Patrol, and the 1941 invasion of Sicily), he moved to St. Petersburg, like so many others in the post-war era. He shot many stories for Life magazine, including a feature on Silas Dent, “The Hermit of Cabbage Key,” and others for the New York Times and Parade magazine. Many highlighted the sunshine and natural beauty of his newfound home. Shere seems to have left the area in 1965 after his wife’s passing. He died in New Smyrna Beach in 1982.
The Post World War II Boom
Sam Shere was part of a massive influx of new residents to St. Petersburg after World War II. Lured by sunshine and warmth, and encouraged to stay by the advent of air conditioning and DDT, the flood of newcomers led to an 87% increase in the city’s population during the decade of the 1950s. Many had been soldiers stationed in St. Petersburg at some point during the war.
Sam Shere was not the only one of the new residents who had a brush with disaster.
Oral surgeon Donald L. Truscott discovered St. Pete when he was assigned to the Maritime Services Training Station at Bayboro Harbor as the head of its dental clinic. Falling in love with the area, he returned to St. Petersburg in 1947 and opened an oral surgery practice in today’s Snell Arcade. But it wasn’t his distinguished career that Truscott was most well-known for. Rather, it was his role as the first survivor of the Morro Castle disaster to swim to shore after the luxury liner faltered off the coast of New Jersey on Sept. 8, 1934. The event was eerily reminiscent of the Titanic’s sinking and memorable in its day, but largely forgotten today.
Truscott’s Travails
Donald Truscott worked his way through college as a hand on ships and ocean liners. During his last summer before graduation he was one of four night watchmen aboard the luxury liner Morro Castle, named for a fortification from the late 1500s that still guards Cuba’s Havana Harbor today. The ship was just 20 miles from shore when a fire broke out in a storage room. The decision was made to head to land, full speed. Truscott roused passengers from their beds and instructed them on how to don their life preservers. When the heat and smoke became too much to bear, he joined others who leaped into the waters below. The ship was eight miles from shore.
Truscott spent the next seven and a half hours swimming to shore. He was the first survivor to reach land under his own power, and photographs of him with seared flesh and tattered clothing were splashed on the front pages of newspapers across the country the next day. At least 135 other passengers and crew perished in the disaster.
The ship continued to drift. By morning, it beached close enough for tourists on the Jersey Shore at Asbury Park to reach out and touch. Its hulk remained there, burned out and abandoned, for six months, becoming a macabre tourist attraction, promoted with picture postcards advertising adjacent shops.
Donald Truscott returned to college, finished dental school, and went on to an impressive career for the U.S. Navy and the public health department, and later, private practice. He relocated permanently to St. Petersburg in 1947, living in Bahama Shores until his death in 1972 at age 63.
One wonders whether Sam Shere and Donald Truscott ever crossed paths and compared notes on their brushes with famous disasters, or reflected upon the interesting confluence of people who arrived in St. Petersburg during the post-war boom.
