[ MAUKA MAKAI ]
BURL BURLINGAME / BBURLINGAME@STARBULLETIN.COM
Doreen Decasa, Pictures Plus Kahala manager, helps photographer Jack Titchen exhibit his historic images.
It doesn't seem that long ago for Star-Bulletin photographer John A. "Jack" Titchen, but it was the Star-Bulletin's Sunday magazine that brought him to Hawaii -- in 1959. Just after statehood. Before our first Republican state governor. Let's see -- that's only 44 years or so ago.
By Burl Burlingame
bburlingame@starbulletin.comLong enough ago that when Doreen Decasa of Pictures Plus saw some of his pictures, the phrase that clicked for her was "nostalgia."
And so Titchen is featured as this month's local artist at the Kahala Mall Pictures Plus outlet, and here are some of his pictures in the Star-Bulletin Sunday magazine. Some things never change.
The photographs capture Hawaii at the cusp of the '60s building boom, a time when most local folks couldn't go downtown without running into someone they knew, before busloads of tourists packed the roads, before acres of houses replaced sugar or pineapple. Honolulu was a small town aglow with potential, when there was still a curfew for kids, television was a sometime thing and newspapers were the main source of news.
"The Bulletin started up this Sunday magazine and they really wanted photographers who could handle color," recalls Titchen. "(Star-Bulletin photographer) Terry Luke was shooting all the color then. I was working in New Hampshire and freelancing in New York when a writer at another paper named Jack Teehan -- we knew each other because our mail always got mixed up -- had moved to Honolulu and advised me that a photo job was opening at the Bulletin.
Among those exhibited is this picture of the first baby seal born at Sea Life park.
"Well, my first wife thought Honolulu would be a great place to work, so I applied, but discovered that chief photographer Warren Roll really wanted someone else. That was that.
"I went off and did some freelance work, and came home on a VERY cold day to a pile of mail, and in it was a red-white-and-blue airmail letter from the Star-Bulletin. In it was a note from Warren, offering me the job. The other guy didn't work out. I called Warren up and he started yelling, Where are you? When are you going to be here? Get moving!"
Titchen chuckled at the memory. "Warren's still that way," he said.
AN AUSTRALIAN by birth, Titchen wound up on the East Coast thanks to indigestion.
Titchen captured the ambience of Queen's Surf as it was in the early '60s, just before it was demolished. This picture never ran in the newspaper.
"I had a lung problem, and was 4-F during the war," he said. "I joined the Australian merchant marine as a radio operator, and a number of Australian sailors were transferred to the American Merchant Marine because Australia ran out of ships.
"We were on a freighter, hauling stuff to England for the invasion -- a hold full of sugar from Havana and a deckload of P-38 fighter planes -- and when we got to England, we offloaded everything, absolutely everything, because England had nothing. They took all of our food except for emergency rations, and sailing back across the Atlantic we had nothing but tinned, salted ham and rusty water. Most of the crew got sick, including myself."
After being treated in a military hospital, Titchen was discharged in New York, but his ship had sailed. He got work in a camera store and began taking photography classes.
"If that hadn't happened, I'd probably still be a merchant seaman. I loved seeing a new port every month!"
That adventurous interest led him to news photography, and Titchen spent time at the Miami Daily News, the Albany Times Union and the Interstate Photographers wire service, as well as a thriving advertising and architectural-photography business. And so from there wound up at the Star-Bulletin. He's been here ever since, except for a few years in the late '80s when he returned to Australia after retiring from the daily-newspaper grind. He also met his second wife Katharine Gauthier, a writer, at the Star-Bulletin. Now retired, Kathy Titchen continues as a freelance writer.
Jack documented the changing face of Hawaii during a critical period, and prints and negatives started piling up in boxes. He didn't think much about it.
"It was my son John who opened the boxes. He's in the Coast Guard and was visiting and I only had one of my pictures on the wall, a nice Cibachrome of a volcano eruption. He and Kathy had good prints made at King Photo -- they do a wonderful job! -- and while getting the photographs framed at Pictures Plus, they noticed the Artist of the Month promotion."
According to Decasa, the showcase is very popular and is booked into next year.
WHAT TITCHEN recalls most about the early days of shooting is the deliberate pace of shooting and processing. "We used Speed Graphics, with a 4-by-5 negative, which meant that at best we only got a few shots at each assignment. So you planned and arranged -- the long shot, the medium shot, the close-up. It wasn't very spontaneous. You developed a sense about the absolute decisive moment to press the shutter.
"Then we got Rolliflexes, which used 2-and-a-quarter-sized film, and you got 12 shots per roll! But the engraving guys on the press refused to use such 'small' images. All the color was done on the Speeds. The guy in change of engraving also refused to use pictures that didn't have a spot of red in it somewhere.
"Looking back, I guess that was a phobia or a psychological quirk. But to this day I worry about getting the color red into every photo."
Before Hawaiian Memorial Park opened, an Easter-egg hunt was staged on the bare ground in 1963. Titchen shot a closeup of a kid finding eggs, then glanced over his shoulder and saw this mass of people spreading out. The Star-Bulletin ran this picture half-page. Titchen also notes that today, the Star-Bulletin's Terry Luke is buried nearby.
When an atomic bomb was set off in the South Pacific in the early '60s, it was predicted the nighttime flash would be seen in Hawaii. The Star-Bulletin photo department planned in excruciating detail to get the picture if that happened.
"It was supposed to go off at 11 p.m., and the disc jockey counted down on the radio, and so we were all issued radios so we could follow the count. And we were given compasses so we could point the camera in the right direction. Well, it was scrubbed three or four times. The final time, I was up on top of Koko Crater, Terry Luke was on Punchbowl, Albert Yamauchi was in Waikiki and Amos Chun was on the beach. Only Jack Matsumoto couldn't shoot it, because he was shooting the Miss Hawaii pageant instead, which teed him off."
In the pitch darkness atop the mountain, Titchen set up a Speed Graphic and popped the shutter open, then covered the camera with a dark cloth. Two other cameras were set up on either side of him, a cable-release in each hand, and when the countdown commenced, Titchen pulled off the cloth cover and long-exposed the film plane to the night. He had worked it all out very scientifically, and the pictures ran worldwide.
Terry Luke's picture was also spectacular. "I asked Terry about his exposure, and he just shrugged and said, 'Aw, I just released it when it felt right,' " recalled Titchen, laughing.
TITCHEN'S ADVICE on sticking it out in journalism: "Always go in with a good attitude. That's the main thing. I remember one day, a Sunday with not much going on, and the feature writer and I had to go down to a hotel and interview Barbara Hutton, the heiress, and her 7th or 8th husband. I was in a really bad mood and didn't want to be there. And she kept talking and talking and talking. She wouldn't let us go!
"Finally, I asked about her jewelry, which was Australian, and she surprised me by naming all these little towns in the Outback. I really started listening and I realized that she was as lonely as a person could be, despite all her money. She was just enjoying having someone to talk to."
What's changed in the photojournalism business?
"It used to be so slow and deliberate -- using Speed Graphics and big film, and it took forever to get the film developed and then rush wet prints to engraving. We used to sweat getting the pictures into the paper on deadline.
"Now, it's instantaneous. You shoot a digital camera, which might transmit the picture right over a cell phone and into the page-layout program. It's still the photographer on the scene getting the best picture that he can. But then you still wind up with some idiot sports editor who crops horizontal pictures into verticals!"
Some things never change.
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Some like it hot -- more than 40 years ago, Star-Bulletin photographer Jack Titchen moved from the ice of New England to the hot lava of Hawaii. Here, in 1960, Titchen climbs away from the erupting Kapoho caldera. on the cover
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