Korean fishermen rescue items from their ship after it ran aground on the reef off Magic Island in 1963. This photo, "Saved From the Sea," was chosen best general news photo of the year in a national journalism competition.

Archivist
& Artist

The work of former Star-Bulletin
photographer Warren Roll garners
attention in San Francisco

Warren Roll was chief photographer at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin from 1956 until 1980, after which he retired to the Big Island to live out the good life.

He is also my former father-in-law, and though we no longer are legally related, I still consider him family, and so was thrilled to see that his son Jonah had arranged an exhibit of some of his father's work this month at the Photography Center in San Francisco.

Jonah is an artist in his own right -- a painter whose works are in many private and commercial collections. But the man of the hour at this exhibit was Warren, whose distinct black-and-white photographs have been capturing history for almost 60 years.

COURTESY OF JAN HAAG Warren Roll's exhibit in San Francisco this month was also the backdrop for a reunion between former Star-Bulletin photographers Bob Young, left, Dick Schmidt, center, and Roll. Young traveled to California from Hawaii just for the exhibit, spent an hour there, then caught the 8 p.m. flight back. Schmidt retired last year as a photographer for the Sacramento Bee.

During World War II in the Pacific theater and the Korean War, Warren was a photographer's mate in the U.S. Navy. From 1948 to 1956, he was chief photographer at the San Rafael Independent Journal, in California.

While at the Star-Bulletin, Roll earned numerous awards for his photos. Many reflect his love for the sea, including ones taken from the Flying Walrus, the boat he lived on at the Ala Wai Boat Harber with his wife Mollie and two youngest sons, Gunnar and Jonah, for almost 20 years. He also took many spectacular aerial shots, often from small planes he piloted himself.

These days, Warren, now 83, lives in Port Ludlow, Wash.

Dick Schmidt, who worked under Warren for a year in the early 1970s and now lives in California, reports that Warren was his "usual bright, quick, irreverent, wisecracking self at the gallery exhibit in his honor."

That's how I remember him, too.

A surfer enjoys a storm in Waikiki, at top. Roll took this picture sometime around 1965.

A Russian research ship meets a supply ship 12 miles off Honolulu in about 1964 -- the Cold War days when such "research" vessels generally were considered to be spy ships as well for the now-defunct Soviet Union. Roll took the photo from his own boat, the Flying Walrus, which he lived on at the Ala Wai Boat Harbor.

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