[Dramatic music] [Sound of a typewriter] BETSY HOY SHIVERICK: The whole thing started when my father passed away, and we really looked back over his photographs.

♪♪ BETSY HOY SHIVERICK: And they were very poorly stashed in cardboard boxes.

And it was a sense of history just tossed away in these boxes.

That's him.

WALLY MCNAMEE: Let me tell you about The Hoy Boys, young guys, in Washington, D.C., beginning photographers.

CARL BERNSTEIN: And most of us started very young, so we grew up in this business.

BETSY HOY SHIVERICK: You know, presidents and first ladies called them all by their first names.

CARL BERNSTEIN: It's exciting.

BETSY HOY SHIVERICK: I think he loved every minute of it.

[Typing] [Tearing of paper from machine] WALLY MCNAMEE: Back then uh, television news was- it wasn't even in its infancy.

It hadn't really been born, and newspapers were the way that people got their news.

MARK REINHARDT: There were more newspaper subscriptions per household then there were households.

KRISTIN GILGER: The photojournalist became the eyes and ears of the news organization on the ground.

HORACE BALLARD: And the journalist has carte blanche as to what they photograph.

[Typewriter clacks] DOUG ANDERSON: The interesting thing I think about the Hoy boys is that they did it together.

BETSY HOY SHIVERICK: Working class, Irish kids who went to work at two very big well-known newspapers in this country.

DOUG ANDERSON: Not a one in a pick a number chance that anybody's going to go from high school to a, a major newspaper.

But for these two kids, these two brothers, these twins, to do it at the same time defies all odds.

BARBARA HOY: It really was, you know, not unusual for you to see a shot by Hoy in the morning and a shot by Hoy at night.

BETSY HOY SHIVERICK: It was a package.

They were a package.

You know, they were The Hoy Boys.

[Guitar rock n roll music] [Pop from flash] HOY SHIVERICK: So, the Hoy boys were born in Ohio.

In addition to the twins, there's another brother Bob, who's several years younger.

BOB HOY: They were born I think in uh '35, I think it was, 1935 during the Depression.

And I was born in '42.

I never got anything new because I had two brothers, and I got two helmets, and two shoulder pads and two bicycles, you know.

MARY HOY: As far as I can remember, my husband and his twin brother were born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and then his father had this opportunity to move to Washington, D.C., he had to do typesetting.

BOB HOY: Our dad, he was a printer.

Down deep he was very kindhearted, but he had a terrible temper.

And Frankie had a bad temper, too.

But Tommy's temperament was more like mom.

Tommy would wing it, you know.

BARBARA HOY: Mrs. Hoy treated Tom and Frank as though they were one.

And Tom and Frank were always together.

And if Frank played football, then Mrs. Hoy assumed that Tom liked football.

Tom shared a room with his brother until we got married, so as a result, the two of them were very close.

HOY SHIVERICK: They fed off of each other very well initially, and then not so well later on.

They were different.

BOB HOY: And this they always used to talk about Frankie got into a fight at school, you know, and two boys jumped him.

Tommy was there too, but he didn't fight as hard as, you know, he was trying to calm people down, and so Frankie was fighting, and they got home and they told my dad about it, and the old man went nuts.

He said, "If they attack one brother, they fight both of you."

Don't forget, this is Irish families now.

MARY HOY: Frank adored his father, and he was so proud, he'd come home on the bus, and every time he'd see his dad get off the bus, he was thrilled.

BARBARA HOY: They grew up in Virginia, and they went to Falls Church High School.

HOY SHIVERICK: He played basketball and Frank played football.

So, I think they were both really popular.

BARBARA HOY: Tom would come into a class that I was in and say to the teacher, "Um, the principal needs to see Barbara Stahl."

And I would get up and walk out, and we would go to Lake Barcroft, and we would swim, and we'd stay there for 2 hours, and we'd get back in the car and go back to school.

[Guitar music continues then fades] [Clacking of typewriter] [Ringing of typewriter bell] [Tearing of paper] HOY SHIVERICK: He had a heart attack, my grandfather, when my father was 17.

BOB HOY: And he was uh 64, I think.

KATE HOY: I just know they had to go to work early and take care of their mother and younger brother because their father's early demise.

SEAN HOY: Now his interest in photography, do we know what that- when he started that?

KEVIN HOY: Copy Room, do you remember, 'because he'd always tell us growing up, he said you know, go to a job, and start in the mailroom and work your way up for 20 years, you know?'

SEAN HOY: Yeah.

BOB HOY: My dad, of course, had some contacts with printers in Washington.

That's what he wanted us to be, was printers.

But the Hoys don't like all that heavy work.

[chuckles] There must be an easier way to do it.

[chuckles] That's the motto of the Hoys.

And then, of course, when Frankie got in, he said, "Hey, this is a good idea.

Why don't you try to get me in?

But they wouldn't hire him because he was the same family.

Tommy, he went over The Star.

I guess he just applied.

He was 18, oh, he could talk his way out of anything.

Tommy could sell refrigerators to Eskimos.

[Jazzy music] [Typewriter clacking] HOY SHIVERICK: So, Uncle Frank is at the Washington Post, and by '54, my dad is at The Evening Star.

And it's easy for us to forget the role that newspapers played in a pre-digital America.

MARK REINHARDT: I think it's hard for those of us who weren't alive then, let alone reading newspapers, and certainly hard for people who are just coming of age in the media environment we have now to understand the importance of the daily newspaper.

BARBARA HOY: The papers were the only source of news.

There was none of this instantaneous news.

So, there was a great respect for the papers.

CARL BERNSTEIN: When I grew up, you had The Washington Post, which was not the major paper in town, you had The Washington Times-Herald, you had the Washington Star, which was the afternoon paper, and was certainly qualitatively the best paper in town.

It had been owned by the same families since it was founded shortly before the Lincoln administration.

WALLY McNAMEE: They had their own personality.

The Evening Star in Washington was like the establishment newspaper.

The Post was a morning newspaper.

The Times-Herald was an around the clock paper.

The Washington Daily News was a tabloid.

RUPERT WELCH: A tabloid, meaning instead of a broad sheet, at that time eight column newspaper sheet, was called a broadsheet.

The tabloid was about half that size.

It was uh really uh designed as a commuter's paper.

You read it on the bus or the subway.

And whether it was sports, crime, or government, people read newspapers.

I know when I was a kid we took two newspapers, and my parents, both of them read newspapers all the way through.

They read everything.

MARK REINHARDT: That ritual of sitting down and opening the paper and knowing more or less who else was doing that and knowing more or less when, normatively at least, they would be doing that is part of what enabled people to imagine everybody else sharing this ritual as bound to the same nation as they were.

WARREN HOGE: It's just an element of how totally involved newspapers were with our lives then.

I mean, they were the source of information, but they also were the chronicle of the life we were living.

[Jazzy music continues and fades] HOY SHIVERICK: My dad used to talk about his copyboy days at The Star, but I'll confess, I never really knew what a copyboy did.

BERNSTEIN: A copy boy did everything.

Reporters, while they were typing their stories on deadline, they'd finish three or four paragraphs and they'd holler, "copy."

FRANK VAN RIPER: Copy was the written product.

It was the copyboy's job to literally take copy from one desk to the other.

WARREN HOGE: If it was a foreign story, that piece of paper went to the foreign desk.

If it was national, it went to the national desk, so there was constant movement of the copyboys running around the room doing those various functions.

BERNSTEIN: Came in at six in the morning, if you were working early shift, all the out-of-town papers would be there.

Cut the bundles and you'd give them out to the various editors.

WELCH: One copy boy every day had the, the, the task of getting the first edition of the newspaper and taking it around to all the different bureaus: police headquarters, Municipal Court, U.S. District Court, House of Representatives, the Senate.

And then they'd give you a streetcar token to come back home on [laughs].

VAN RIPER: You also were an all-around gopher.

BERNSTEIN: You got coffee for people; you cashed their checks next door at the liquor store sometimes.

There were a lot of people who sent you out for booze.

WALLY McNAMEE: At the same time, you're absorbing a lot of what is going on.

ARNOLD TAYLOR: Walked in off the street.

I guess they saw that I was good looking and...

Desperate.

I was desperate.

And they only paid at that time $33.50 a week.

And the fact that I was a low man on the totem pole didn't mean a damn bit of difference, because I had the hope of getting on the photo staff.

VAN RIPER: If you had ambition, if you had a certain amount of talent, you didn't have to be a genius, you could ascend the ranks.

WELCH: Well, my first encounter with Tom, he wasn't a photographer yet.

He was working down in picture files.

That was a step up.

He's working with pictures, and he's working under under the supervision of the photo editor Walter Wood.

BARBARA HOY: Walter was very good to Tom and obviously encouraged him and gave him a lot of good assignments and a lot of good opportunity.

We were so young, I mean, and Tom really started to do all of this in earnest as a photographer, probably, he was about 19 years old.

The photographers took Tom under their wing and taught him.

They began to just take him out when they'd go, and then society people met him and liked him so they would have him go because he could represent the Star very well.

TAYLOR: I never had any doubt about sending Tom Hoy on an assignment.

I knew he was coming back with something good.

[Reflective music] REINHARDT: If we're talking about the 50's, with a country as complex and large as ours is, any period, is complicated and contradictory in ways we often don't remember, and probably especially the 50's.

If you think about, "I like Ike," suburban development, the interstate highway system, that conjures up one sense of the 50's.

If you said McCarthyism, Brown versus Board of Education, the civil rights movement, that might be another sense of the 50's.

If you said beatniks, abstract expressionism, that might be yet another one.

It's a time of economic growth and expansion, of opportunity and promise for a lot of ordinary people.

HOGE: It was postwar prosperity.

It was suburban prosperity.

It was people who had come back from the war, they were starting middle class lives.

There was a clear ladder.

Each generation was expected, and did do better than the generation before.

REINHARDT: Anxiety too.

Cold War, nuclear concerns.

That expression that you would have heard a lot in the U.S. by the 1950's about "the leader of the free world, that emerges, that language of "the free world" is a Cold War language.

So, promise, opportunity, in the context of global rivalry, and one very large anxiety or uncertainty.

It was a good time to be a photojournalist.

And it was maybe before the hyper-credentialed had completely taken over the media.

KRISTIN GILGER: One of the interesting things about Tom and Frank, and many journalists in that era, they were not college educated.

And it was a blue-collar profession.

CHRISTY HOY GOSNELL: They really learned on their own.

And they didn't go to school for it.

They just learned it.

JAMES DANZIGER: The fact that Tom and Frank Hoy became salaried photojournalists is really an extraordinary testament to their drive and ambition and work ethic.

REINHARDT: The particular pathway that they took, becoming a photographer, making a living doing that, that was an available pathway for ambitious working-class kids that's largely disappeared.

KRISTIN GILGER: Now, primarily, your training takes place in in a college setting, in a journalism school.

It used to be that you could go into a newspaper and not know anything, you know, you start as a copy boy, you don't know how to take photos, you don't know how to write a story, you don't know how to report.

You didn't have to because you had people who could teach you.

Newspapers and television stations and other media outlets now, frankly, don't have the staffs or the luxury for that.

They need people to come in ready.

They also need people who are digitally prepared in a way that they aren't, so they can't teach it.

[Ambient reflective music] [Reading, written by Tom Hoy] December 15th, 1956.

Staff Photographer, Evening Star.

After three years as Detail Messenger, Composing Room Messenger, Copyboy and Picture Files Clerk.

Salary?

$56 a week.

Tom Hoy, The Evening Star.

[Music continues] BARBARA HOY: Tom was a rule breaker.

There were no rules that applied to Tom.

There wasn't a situation that intimidated him, that made him say, "I'm not going to do that."

And if you told him to do one thing, [chuckles] lots of luck to you, he's not going to do it.

He would get tired of waiting for the bus, and at that time you could hitchhike, he'd hitchhike back down, back Massachusetts Avenue and back down again.

And that was a little embarrassing from time to time.

He used to hitchhike home with a pizza.

He wanted to bring home a pizza, so he did.

[laughs] BOB HOY: They both married, as far as I know, really the first girl they ever dated.

Tommy and Barbara were high school sweethearts.

You know?

And then Frankie came out and dated a little bit, but he married a beautiful girl also.

And that's what you did.

KATE HOY: My mother, she came from upstate Michigan.

So, I think it was very backwoods and not a lot of opportunity.

So, she just packed up and left one day and went to Washington, which was a huge trip to make, and then met my father pretty shortly after that.

MARY HOY: When I was 18 years old, I had a girlfriend who had a car.

So, we got in her little car and went out to Washington, D.C., and I interviewed with The Washington Post and got my position.

I was good at the shorthand and typing.

So that's how I got in.

It didn't take me long to meet Frank because I was in administration, he was up in the newsroom, and we'd go up and down in the elevator together.

KATE HOY: He always thought she was the most beautiful woman he's ever met.

He kept that throughout his life.

MARY HOY: He was smart, you know?

And he had ambition, and he was fun.

He was fun.

He really liked me.

And I liked him.

Tom was the best man.

Barbara was my maid of honor.

♪♪ BARBARA HOY: We went together for about eight years before we got married.

We always laughed and said there were no good movies in town, so there was nothing left to do but get married.

There were so many photographers at the wedding.

They would chase us.

We got in our car, and they would chase us to find out where we were going.

They just wouldn't leave us alone.

But anyway, I was perfectly happy to stay with them.

You know, I mean, in those days there was, you know, you were happy to get married because it was a lot to come.

I didn't have any idea what I was doing.

Not the vaguest.

Not the vaguest.

HOY SHIVERICK: He was 23 and mom was 22 and I was born that next year.

So, you know, it was bing, bang.

And then Christy was born the year after.

She was born a year and a day after I was.

MARY HOY: There's pictures of our reception at the Washington Post, because we were both Post people, you know, so they had it, they had it at the paper.

In fact, one of the ladies there that worked there, I didn't have much money, and she leant me her wedding dress.

We got married in 1961.

And then I had to quit because I got pregnant.

[chuckles] And I got pregnant again.

And then I got pregnant with the twins.

My husband had started at 15 in the dark room and had just been there a long time.

And he had a good eye.

He had a very good eye.

JAMES DANZIGER: The era of Frank and Tom's photography is the era of black and white photography.

And especially in Frank's pictures, you see him using black and white as elements of the picture.

BERNSTEIN: You know, I knew both of them pretty well, because photographers would go out, and then as a copy boy I would run film back in '60, '61-something like that.

Frank might have been more of a perfectionist in some ways.

Whereas Tom wouldn't sacrifice the good in search of the perfect.

HOY SHIVERICK: I think my father was sort of a, a more fly by the seat of his pants kind of photographer.

DANZINGER: Tom was "a get the shot" guy.

You know, you see in Tom's pictures, he likes to get as close as possible to the subject.

HORACE BALLARD: People broke their veneer for Tom.

He allows people to be their full selves.

And you can only capture that if you're giving that.

If they trust you enough.

JAMES DANZIGER: When you get to Frank, you see someone who is really interested in composition.

BALLARD: You see someone who is exacting.

We're voyeurs.

We're in the right place at the wrong time or the wrong place at the right time with Frank.

DANZINGER: I'm sure that both as twins and as photographers, there was great competition between Frank and Tom.

I can't imagine that it would have been any other way.

BARBARA HOY: In the heyday they would both be at the same place often.

And probably inside they wanted to best one another if they could.

WALLY McNAMEE: We hung together not only professionally but socially.

And we were very enthusiastic participants in the freeloading circuit.

[Reading, written by Tom Hoy] August 27, 1960.

Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, Birthday party at the Mayflower Hotel.

Frank and I help eat the cake.

[Rock n roll, bluesy music] [Clacking of typewriter] BERNSTEIN: The Star was the dominant paper in that era.

There was a competitive ethic, particularly about beating the Washington Post, which we did with great and delightful regularity, that drove the agenda.

WELCH: To get a story they didn't get.

To get the story first.

To get the story right.

BERNSTEIN: I think one of the things that made The Star perhaps unique was the camaraderie of the place.

TAYLOR: We were a family.

BERNSTEIN: I've never seen anything like it in in the newspaper business.

There was a great affection among the reporters uh, and the staff and the desk people.

JOHN SHERWOOD: We used to play pranks on one another.

You would be typing copy, and occasionally somebody would come up and set, set the paper on fire.

TAYLOR: Let's see now, I was four years on the street shooting pictures, and then I was made assistant picture editor, see.

Over here is Howard Dutkin, a hot sketch.

Over here, Fifi Gorski, reporters.

And they just were lots of fun.

Along comes Tom Hoy, even more fun!

BERNSTEIN: Well, if you're working in that kind of an environment, close up against people, and you see what's being made at the same time.

And papers are coming down five times a day.

Uh, it's a very exciting thing to watch, and to be part of.

TAYLOR: You knew that you were in the middle of history.

BERNSTEIN: You also knew that what you were writing was being read by hundreds of thousands of people.

Quite extraordinary, the picture you were taking was being seen by hundreds of thousands of people.

With that, went a real responsibility as well.

Stories are changing all the time.

The wire room is over there, the news coming in from all over the world.

So, there is an electricity to the place that is there constantly, until that last edition is finished.

And when that last edition was finished, then groups of people would go out together.

And this was a drinking place.

WELCH: Everybody smoked.

Everybody drank.

People went out early for a lunch because you came in at six o'clock in the morning on the first shift, so you'd be going out for lunch at 10:30 in the morning drinking martinis.

We called them Silver Bullets.

But at 10:30 in the morning, you know, you have a couple of those double extra dries, it kinda gets you rockin' for the rest of the day.

HOGE: The Washington Star was an afternoon paper, so you went to work very early.

6 A.M. in the morning is when people began arriving.

And one of the things they told me the very first day I was there, "I don't care what shape you're in, you just got to be in your chair at 6 a.m." In the years after that, I was to remember there were some people who came in directly from the bar, would be in the chair at six and slumped down on top of the typewriter, but they were there.

And if somebody from the City Desk called and said, "Hey, Harry, call for you on six."

They would wake up and take some notes like that, and sometimes go right back to sleep again.

BERNSTEIN: Everybody who worked at The Star will tell you they never had so much fun in their lives.

We did not have that kind of fun at The Washington Post.

When I went to The Post, I thought I'd gone to work for an insurance company.

I mean, day and night.

Everything I know about journalism.

I learned at The Star.

There's no way to prepare for what happened in Watergate.

But the basic reportorial notions, as well as the possibilities of journalism, opened up at The Star.

[Bluesy music crescendos and fades out] [Voice says 'and that's that.']

VAN RIPER: In every crusade, there's an awful lot of drudgery.

Both photographers and reporters will- will tell you about all the hours they spent waiting for something to happen.

You're hanging around someplace, and when it happens it happens real fast and you better be on your game.

A really good photographer can handle any assignment.

It can be human interest, it can be a puff piece, it can be anything.

WELCH: Yeah, we have a big fire or a hold up.

I was working with another photographer, Arnie Sachs, and we heard on the radio about an ax murderer.

And Arnie says, "hey, that's right off North Capitol."

We were coming in North Capitol.

So, we go over there.

And there's this big... it's a brownstone.

And uh, there's a lone cop, a young cop standing out front all by himself.

We had identified ourselves.

"We heard there was an ax murder."

He said, "Yeah."

I said, "Where?

Where is it?

Where?"

He said, "Third floor."

We went charging up the stairs and the guy was there, and he still had the ax.

And so, we turned around and we got out of there.

And I get downstairs, I said, "The guy still had the ax!"

And he says, "Yeah."

He says, "That's why I'm waiting for backup."

[laughs] [Pecking of typewriter] [Reflective Music] HOY SHIVERICK: Tom and Frank could not have picked a better time to be photojournalists.

GILGER: In Tom and Frank's era, this is when we're really starting to see the power of photography.

I don't know if you'd call it a golden era, but it's certainly a time of transformation.

BERNSTEIN: The paper became a... a visual experience, not just about reading it, but about seeing through great photographs.

DANZINGER: We can remember iconic pictures.

We can't remember text.

And we can't remember most headlines.

But we have a memory bank of dozens of iconic photo journalistic images.

REINHARDT: Word people sometimes have simple minded ideas about the work that pictures do.

And they also always want the image to be subordinate to the word.

GILGER: There are always a lot of tensions between the word people and the visual people.

So that tension actually worked, I think, well in newspapers.

HOGE: The page one picture, the picture desk always wanted that to be the best possible picture.

They would object sometimes if they had a great picture and the editor would say, "But I don't want a picture of that.

I want a picture of this story."

That was a constant tension and a very creative one between the picture people who wanted the best picture, and and the news people who wanted the best illustration, basically.

BARBARA HOY: There was competition between the reporters and the photographers because the reporters thought they were smarter.

McNAMEE: There were very few reporters that...that were not college graduates.

There were very few photographers who were college graduates.

That's the way it was.

[Reading, written by Frank Hoy] When shooting, you must be hyperactive to cover fast moving events.

But for successful printing, you need the opposite personality.

Your other self should be calm and analytical.

Frank Hoy, The Washington Post.

WALLY McNAMEE: Back in that era also, the dominant tool of our trade was a 4 x 5 Speedgraphic.

TAYLOR: And I mean to tell you, that dude is heavy.

DANZINGER: This was a camera which weighed close to 6 pounds.

You could only take one picture at a time before reloading, and it was really something that was tough to learn.

VAN RIPER: You were working literally with 4 by 5 sheets of film.

You did not work fast that way.

McNAMEE: You would put one holder in at a time.

You would be able to take a picture about every 15 seconds with it.

TAYLOR: One negative in a holder.

And you pull out the plastic, shoot the picture, put the plastic back in again, turn the holder over, pull out the plastic.

VAN RIPER: The technology is almost exactly the same as the camera that Matthew Brady used during the Civil War.

But, you know, it's one of those things, if it ain't broke don't fix it, because the technology worked great.

ETHAN MILLER: They would be very careful get the shot they need, and then whatever their deadline was, they would have to get in their car or whatever back to the newspaper, soup the film, take the enlarger, you know, do the whole thing where you're looking through, you make the print, you had to actually get it to the right size.

You had to sit there, burn and dodge, and not in Photoshop in a computer where it's nice and easy.

You had to actually do it.

And if you just screwed up for like one second, up, throw it out, do another one.

That's all time consuming.

You have to know how much time it's going to take you to do all that stuff and make sure you get it done just ahead of when your deadline is.

Otherwise, you're not getting in the paper.

There was no "well we'll put it online."

No online.

If you missed it, you missed it.

TAYLOR: For the inauguration the press had a big stand built.

And we had a photographer there.

When the swearing in happened right at the stroke of 12, shot the picture, put the plastic in.

Took the holder out.

A runner was there who took it to the edge of the um, stand, dropped it down to a motorcycle rider.

And we had a car there with a phone, and he'd call in to say that the motorcycle was on the way.

We had the elevators stopped until he got there.

Up he went.

Into the soup the negative went.

When it came out, we printed it wet.

Sent the picture upstairs to the engravers and by dingies, there it was.

So that our noon edition had a picture of the swearing in.

[Camera shutter] TAYLOR: Boom, there it was.

JUDGE: Dwight B. Eisenhower do solemnly swear.

DWIGHT B. EISENHOWER: I, Dwight B. Eisenhower, do solemnly swear- JAMES DANZIGER: During the sixties, the quality of 35-millimeter film was improving.

And so, at the point when picture editors would accept 35-millimeter film, then you saw the transition from the Speedgraphic to 35-millimeter.

McNAMEE: Now, with the automatic cameras, just bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.

You take pictures faster than you can even imagine.

VAN RIPER: When you take a look at the 4 by 5 Speedgraphic and you say, "oh my god, those poor guys carrying all that stuff."

With each successive camera, each gets smaller and smaller, you would think ah, it's much easier.

Mmm mm.

MILLER: When we got digital, we were like, oh everything's going to be a lot easier.

Everything will be a lot faster.

And then we soon realized, "well, okay, now you're going to carry a laptop with you and something to transmit with."

And "oh by the way, the games at 7:00, we'd like one photo at 7:01pm, and then could you maybe get some stuff at half time, maybe ten photos."

We're always on deadline now.

"Why don't I have the photo yet?"

"Well, the game hasn't started yet.

Give me a minute."

[camera shutter] [Reading, written by Frank Hoy] Change has always been a vital part of photojournalism, and the best of the new photojournalists have always learned the old ways first and then adapted them to the challenges of the present.

Frank Hoy.

MARY HOY: Frank went to one event in D.C. and for some reason didn't catch his bus.

So, he was walking down the highway and got hit by a car and was in the hospital for quite a while.

KATE HOY: I think after that he had physical issues getting around, doing some of the photography that he had to ignore.

And I remember it gave him a scar right here on his forehead.

KEVIN HOY: It looked almost like a question mark, really.

And when he would get angry, this vein, it just seemed like it would just almost become more red.

That was intimidating.

KATE HOY: My father was very intense.

He was emotional.

His moods could change on a dime.

So, you never knew what storm you were dealing with.

It could go from extremely creative, very funny, to the whole world is falling apart, nothing is right.

Personally, I think that comes with a creative mind, and he definitely had an artistic soul.

BOB HOY: Got a great job, got a beautiful wife, I mean, four great kids.

And uh, there was just something there wasn't satisfied?

HOY SHIVERICK: I don't know about Frank, but I don't think my dad started getting big assignments until around 1957.

The Churchill picture was a big turning point.

JOHN SHERWOOD: Tom took a picture of a smiling Churchill in an open car with a smiling President Eisenhower.

BARBARA HOY: Tom made copies, sent it to Winston Churchill in England, made copies, obviously, for them to keep and all of that.

And people said, "Oh he'll never sign it.

He doesn't sign things."

So, Tom said, "Well, I'll take a chance."

[Reading written by Tom Hoy] A month later I received a large envelope labeled "On Her Majesty's Service."

I took the signed picture to Press Secretary Jim Haggerty at the White House and asked if President Eisenhower would sign it.

He said, "Leave the photo and we'll do it later."

I hesitated.

With the Churchill autograph, I can't leave it.

Jim took the photo and walked through the door to the Oval Office coming back minutes later with the ink from Eisenhower's signature still wet.

Tom Hoy.

[Typewriter clacking] HOGE: I went to Washington because Washington was the city all young Americans wanted to go to, because we were going to change the world.

We had a president born in the 20th century.

Jack Kennedy, with all the youthfulness and the Camelot spirit he brought to Washington, we all wanted to be there.

And on top of that, to be a journalist in Washington, meant you were right in on the ground floor of what we all thought was going to be an amazing, movement in America.

And frankly, we thought we were going to do a much better job than our parents had done.

HOY GOSNELL: My father would include my mother.

So, my mother would come join him downtown uh, when he was on stories.

My mother recalls meeting John Kennedy at the airport.

[Reading, written by Tom Hoy] July 1, 1960.

Leave work at 5:30 and come home to get a call from Arnold Taylor at The Picture Desk.

He sends me to National Airport for pics of Senator John Kennedy leaving for Democratic convention in Los Angeles.

After a short wait with Barbara, Senator Kennedy arrives.

BARBARA HOY: I'm sitting down waiting for him to come.

And as I'm sitting down, I look down and I see the most incredible pair of shoes I've ever seen in my life.

I followed those shoes all the way up, and I saw the most incredible, good-looking man I've ever seen in my life.

My God, he was gorgeous.

I thought I was going to swoon.

So, he goes over to the coke machine and he's doing this.

WELCH: Bobby was the same way.

They didn't carry money.

And somebody who was with them always gets stuck with the bill [chuckles].

So.

BARBARA HOY: He says, "Son, have you got any change?"

Tom was making at that time, probably about $45 or $50 a week at The Star.

So, he's lending this millionaire money.

So, John Kennedy goes out on the tarmac.

And then the caption in the paper was, "Supporters wave goodbye to John Kennedy on his way to Hyannis Port."

Supporters?

That was me and Tom.

Literally no one else there, but just the three of us.

[Reading written by Tom Hoy] If he gets to be president, I'll ask for that dime back.

JOHN F. KENNEDY: Preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

JUDGE: So help me God.

JOHN F. KENNEDY: So help me, God.

[Crowd cheers and applauds] BARBARA HOY: It's hard for people to realize how young Kennedy was, and how young Jackie Kennedy was to be First Lady.

And in fact, she really brought some class to this town.

One of the pictures that Tom had shot when Charles de Gaulle was here with Jacqueline Kennedy.

And she, of course, was speaking French to him.

But again, with her ease and her grace, she made it all seem very simple.

And in reality, she was really quite young to be doing all of that.

TAYLOR: And everything seemed to be hunky dory.

It was a beautiful period of our... national life.

MARY HOY: We would go to, you know some of the dinners, the White House correspondent's dinners quite often.

I was always afraid I wouldn't be able to dress up enough to to be with all those cool people.

They would all be there.

Bobby Kennedy locks eyes with you.

You know, and Ethel Kennedy and I were very pregnant with Kathleen, my daughter, and with one of hers, and rubbed our bellies together.

[chuckles] It was exciting life.

[Reading written by Tom Hoy] After the photo appeared in The Washington Star on Saturday, January 21st, 1962.

I received a call from the White House press secretary, Pierre Salinger.

"Tom, the family loves your picture.

Can we have copies?"

TAYLOR: Most of the photographers would be out front to shoot a picture of the President at the... rostrum.

Tom goes around in the back and gets a picture of the whole business.

And prizewinner.

McNAMEE: Look, this is a picture that could make a career.

This is an extraordinary event, and then a very difficult place to get to.

Photographers who achieve are the ones who, at an extraordinary event, are able to make an extraordinary picture that is different from what everybody else does.

And he did it.

VAN RIPER: He was able to make one shot.

He waits there until the very last minute.

Kennedy turns.

You see the hairline on that big head of hair, and he turns with that characteristic finger gesture like this.

And Tom makes the shot.

[Camera shutter] VAN RIPER: The next picture on his roll of film is an empty podium, so he had one time to get it.

So, he says, "Oh."

And he says, I hope I got it."

He races back to the paper.

And happily, this is one of those situations where The Washington Star knew they had a great picture, and then they ran it very big the next day.

[Sounds of Mission Control] MISSION CONTROL: And God speed, John Glenn.... [Rumble of rocket] [Reading, written by Tom Hoy] The daring of Glenn's solo orbit of Earth on February 20th equaled Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic for heroism.

HOY SHIVERICK: Another good story is of John Glenn, when he came back from his space shot, and apparently John Glenn called The Star and asked to speak to my father.

[Reading, written by Tom Hoy] The picture ran in the paper that day, along with other pictures of the parade downtown and his visit to Congress.

Suddenly, William Hill, the managing editor, came dashing up.

"Tom, phone call for you.

It's John Glenn."

I picked up the phone in Mr. Hill's office and I said, "Hello.

Colonel."

Several Star staffers gathered at the open door and stared open mouth as I talked with Colonel Glenn.

"Tom, we all liked that picture you took of me and President Kennedy today, and I wondered if I might get a print for my mother?"

BARBARA HOY: So, the next morning he got up and he delivered one to Colonel Glenn's mother, and one to Colonel Glenn and he kept one for himself.

[Reading written by Tom Hoy] I walked up to the front door and drew a loud roar from the media, camped outside.

I just waved.

I told Mrs. Glenn, who answered the door, that I had a delivery for Colonel Glenn's mother and handed her the prints.

Seizing the moment, I brashly asked if the Colonel would autograph one for me, which he did.

JOHN F. KENNEDY: And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

[Applause and cheers] WELCH: Maybe when you're looking back on a period in your life wh- from the vantage point of being 80 years old, uh, you forget the bad stuff.

And it all... it all seems good.

[Melancholy music] WELCH: That day I was working in the office.

I had been at police headquarters at 6:00 in the morning.

It was getting to be 1:30.

I was, I was going to leave, leave for the day.

I started rolling my sleeves down.

And... a voice, and it was, it was John Cassidy.

He had a deep voice.

And I could just hear him.

I can still hear him.

He said, "Kennedy's been shot."

And I wasn't thinking Texas.

I was thinking White House.

I said, "Where?"

And somebody else said, "In the head."

By this time then Sid Epstein is back, comes back from lunch.

And he said, you know, "Get out to Andrews."

And on the way, we hear on the radio, that Kennedy is dead.

[Reading, written by Tom Hoy] Front page of The Washington Star with my picture of the President's body entering the White House gates.

I was at the White House all night.

And with the rest of the news people visited the East Room to view the President's casket at daybreak.

Tom Hoy [Music fades] WELCH: We worked right on through that whole weekend.

TAYLOR: For us, it was a matter of getting the pictures that tell the story.

Got to get the picture that tells the story.

WELCH: I didn't feel anything.

Get the story, get the job done.

It's work, this is.

It's your job.

That's it.

McNAMEE: If I was nervous, I was not aware of it.

I had my wits about me, and I was concentrating on on what I was doing.

But when I finished taking the last pictures from the top of the Lincoln Memorial, and I thought about what had happened over the past three or four days, I was close to tears.

But that's something that, as a photographer, as a journalist, you can't allow yourself to do when you're working.

But in this case, I was finished working.

[Music gets louder and ends] [Protestors chanting] MARK REINHARDT: One of the more ideologically polarized general elections of the 20th century is gearing up when Kennedy is assassinated.

So, it's not as if there's simply a happy consensus that was blown to bits by Lee Harvey Oswald.

But it's probably true that even those who were vilifying Kennedy the day before the assassination felt they were participating in a national sense of mourning the day after.

MARY HOY: It didn't matter if you were a Democrat or Republican or an Independent or anything else.

That was just the day we all knew our President had been assassinated.

And everybody, I don't care what their political party was, everybody was extremely upset.

FRANK VAN RIPER: After that, you know, we had the Vietnam War escalated the way it did.

You know, you had Bobby Kennedy shot, you had Martin Luther King shot.

Literally, people wondering is the fabric of American society going to be so torn that it's never going to be able to come back together.

HOGE: Washington in those days was a city, as it still is, of four quadrants.

Northwest was the only place anybody who was white would ever live.

The other three quadrants were exclusively Black.

Segregation was that strict.

It was a deeply segregated city.

Remember, it had no city government.

It was run by the House District Committee and the Senate District Committee.

And those committees were always headed by Dixiecrats who had no love of the residents of Washington who considered a Black city and didn't want to see their own cities become that way.

Reporters of that period, the great reporters, there were people who were older than I was.

They really cut their teeth on civil rights coverage.

Black people would have no representation unless we were there with our cameras taking notes.

And as journalists, it was our responsibility.

BALLARD: Many of those organizations that are known to us today, like SNCC, or Core, specifically trained their volunteer activists how to present themselves in order to be photographed, in order to draw a photographer's eye, and in order to make sure that no matter what the language around the image was that the photograph would convey people of dignity, people of great bearing, people of self-containment and self-control, people who should not be harmed.

People whose side we should immediately be on, because with the exception of the color of their skin, their clothing, their bearing, their demeanor fits with who we feel that we are as a nation.

VAN RIPER: It was a great time to be a journalist.

It was a great time to be a photographer.

Uh, but it was also a... very trying time.

[Eerie ambient music] MARY HOY: Photographers were very competitive with each other up there in the newsroom.

And it was quite an honor when my husband got to be a White House correspondent.

You know, he traveled with the White House crowd and was gone an awful lot.

And of course, when the riots were going on in D.C., I didn't see my husband for days and he'd come home and smell like smoke.

[Eerie music continues] BALLARD: Frank's work in the riots not only won awards, but they get at an America that right under the surface was in turmoil about who it was.

An America that had lost its way ideologically.

We see Frank Hoy as a person grappling with himself, grappling with America, grappling with the subject.

His wrestling transforms then our understanding of a subject.

Who are we as a nation and who do we want to be as a nation?

BERNSTEIN: Your job is being dictated by events.

[Camera shutters] BERNSTEIN: You don't know in the morning what you're going to do.

Every day is really different.

You're not in charge of what happens.

You respond to what happens.

[Beatles fans screaming] McNAMEE: If anything, that to me, was part of the attraction to the career and the job was that you were living a different lifestyle from other people.

BERNSTEIN: You don't know what it's going to be, but you know how to get there, you know what to look for and what will make the description of it better.

So that becomes what this enterprise was about to to a certain extent.

Responding with a different eye than a civilian.

HOGE: I remember the time being very proud of being part of this institution.

And I remember at the time also caring deeply about whether I was being fair and whether I was capturing both sides of an issue, all these things that have now been clichéd and discredited.

But they're real, and they existed, and they were the best kinds of models to follow.

And that was the journalism that was being practiced in Washington at that particular period.

REINHARDT: If you think about the way the term mainstream media is used now as a term of derision or criticism, it's hard to imagine an expression like that operating in that way 50 years ago.

BERNSTEIN: We really had this notion at The Star of you wanted the best obtainable version of the truth.

That meant you saw lots of sources.

That meant that you uh...that you didn't just take a handout and rewrite it.

McNAMEE: They didn't sling the news out like they do now.

We have 24/7 coverage of news.

WELCH: A lot of stories just aren't checked out enough.

There's a lot of misinformation.

There are mistakes.

DOUG ANDERSON: There was a term applied to the role of journalists, it was coined in the middle 1950's, and they were called gatekeepers.

Good journalists today are sense makers and authenticators.

They have to make some sense out of this morass of information that is out there.

REINHARDT: We have to be careful about nostalgia, too.

I think before there was a right-wing critique of the mainstream media, there was a left-wing critique of the mainstream media.

It was a big part of the '60's.

It was a critique of the coziness of the press with the establishment.

The extent to which it was part of the establishment.

But they probably weren't imagining cries of fake news and the systematic discrediting of people whose facts you don't like, that's so much a part of our landscape now.

[Mysterious music] BALLARD: Tom Hoy and Frank Hoy were both members of the White House News Photographers Association, founded in 1921.

It has now grown to a group of over 800 photographers from around the world committed to the same ideals 95 years later.

These are the ideals of fidelity to the story, rigor in terms of the composition, conveying in the clearest possible terms who Americans are for other Americans.

DANZINGER: The extraordinary thing is that is the way Tom and Frank came out of a non-photographic, non-esthetic background and became prizewinning photographers.

And they had long and successful careers as photojournalists.

[Reflective guitar music] BERNSTEIN: The Star, it had been in a building 'til 1959 on Pennsylvania Avenue.

It had been there for damn near a century, I think.

And they moved to a new building at 225 Virginia Avenue so they could have a modern printing plant and get the paper out to the suburbs faster.

BARBARA HOY: Tom left The Star because of the move, which he didn't like at all, because he felt totally removed from what had been his heart.

It was changing.

HOY GOSNELL: You know, my father loved working at The Star.

But I think that the defining factor of his leaving was that he, I always remember he said this, he got to choose whether or not he worked Christmas Day or Christmas Eve.

And I think that that was just a hard choice for him.

BOB HOY: Tommy had a feel about things.

You know, that this was a great time, and I'm a young guy and I've got two kids now and, you know, it's not going to go any better.

Yeah, I'll take another President's photograph and another this, but he had done it.

HOY SHIVERICK: He loved it.

He wasn't going to get this kind of access or this kind of recognition in any other kind of job.

But I think he realized that this wasn't going to pay the bills.

The security, the benefits, the- you know, all the kinds of things that go along with raising a family and a steady paycheck, I think that's really was the motivating factor behind him leaving.

[Reflective music] BETSY HOY SHIVERICK: We would see my Uncle Frank and Aunt Mary and their four kids.

We didn't live very far away from each other.

You know, they lived in Virginia.

We lived in Maryland.

But all that stopped suddenly when I was about nine and we never knew why.

KATE HOY: Tom and Frank were estranged for at least 30 to 40 years.

KEVIN HOY: I mean they, it's just it's kind of hard to believe that they would be twins and not... all the commonalities they had just, not talk.

I couldn't imagine you and I not talking for 30 years.

MARY HOY: Frank just cut off.

He just cut off any communication with his brother.

And it wasn't Tom.

Tom always tried to stay in touch.

He was very good.

But Frank built up some sort of a resentment.

We never could figure it out, the rest of the family.

Tom would call.

He used to call quite often, and I talked to him, you know, we'd talk, we'd chat.

But as soon as I tell Frank, "you know, it's Tom", well, "I don't want to talk to him."

KATE HOY: My father abandoned the niceties for family very early, so calling up his brother perhaps on Christmas and saying, "hey, how are you doing?"

He wouldn't go for any of that.

If they weren't aligned artistically, if somebody wasn't thinking the way he thought, he just let them go.

HOY SHIVERICK: Dad went to work for a very large trade association.

It was the National Rural Electrification Cooperative Association.

He slogged away behind the desk at a big office in D.C., and that just really wasn't him.

BARBARA HOY: He didn't like it when he went to work for the trade association.

He worked, you know, 9 to 5.

And he would travel a lot because he was the photo editor.

So, he was gone.

He liked that part of it.

HOY SHIVERICK: Part of his job was to do photography for the newsletter, which was, you know, a little dinky thing that nobody ever read.

But, you know, it was really important to him.

On the road he was much happier.

KATE HOY: He saw Tom as selling out, I think.

And we kind of- we knew that as kids.

Um, but he just stopped all communication.

HOY SHIVERICK: It was just a difference in, in what they wanted out of life.

[Reflective music] CARL BERNSTEIN: The Star represented the city.

Its focus was Washington.

But the family that owned it um, had not kept pace with the second half of the 20th century, a time of great change.

McNAMEE: The Star was starting to descend as The Post ascended.

BERNSTEIN: Editorially, Bradlee started to invent a new newspaper.

McNAMEE: Ben Bradlee came to work at The Post.

He was brought to the paper by Katharine Graham because she wanted to build the paper up into a kind of a super newspaper that would really compete on all levels with The New York Times.

Watergate certainly uh, did change journalism.

And Woodward and Bernstein did an important job, because it made so many young journalists thereafter want to be "WoodStein."

MAN TESTIFYING: He opined that he did not think the Senate would be dumb enough to go for the bait that he had given them but he was hopeful that they might.

McNAMEE: Also, when the Watergate hearings started, television news finally got into doing the story.

Print journalism had been way ahead of them before that.

Like I think nearly all afternoon newspapers, The Star just went out of business.

It couldn't function economically.

REINHARDT: You wonder if anybody could have saved a paper like The Star.

The very things that a still photographer brought to the newspaper can be exceptionally rich on a television news story in a way that a reading experience can't match.

Television offered something in many ways more immediate and viscerally satisfying.

There's... a power to that immediacy.

WALTER CRONKITE: This report.

For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.

And that's the way it is.

REINHARDT: TV and suburbanization together effectively killed the afternoon and evening newspaper.

[Eerie ambient music fades out] MARY HOY: The newspaper business was very competitive, not just between The Evening Star and The Washington Post, but on staff.

BERNSTEIN: The internal competition at The Washington Post against each other was fierce compared to The Star, where it was collegial, competitive to some extent.

People were ambitious, wanted to get ahead, but very different at The Post.

MARY HOY: When my husband decided to leave the Washington Post, it was not good.

And I think he was very frustrated.

KATE HOY: When political stuff would come up within the newspaper, you had to play certain games in order to get ahead.

He wasn't willing to do that.

McNAMEE: But, you know, he left to do something very worthwhile.

He left to try and lend his experience and his knowledge to students at a leading institution.

KATE HOY: We moved to Syracuse University in approximately 1972, somewhere around there...'73.

And uh, he took a job as a professor at Syracuse University, teaching photojournalism.

MARY HOY: And then ASU recruited him to come down and help set up the Walter Cronkite School.

So, then we came down in 1978 to uh, to Arizona.

DOUG ANDERSON: Frank got both of his degrees, his baccalaureate degree and his master's degree, working at night school while working full time at The Washington Post.

And then was at the Post nearly 20 years, right at it, and then went to Syracuse University, where he taught for a handful of years before coming to ASU.

[Guitar rock n roll music] DOUG ANDERSON: This was a guy who was the photo program for 20 years at Arizona State.

But Frank was very well plugged in.

And he, of course, wrote the... his textbook in 1986, Prentice Hall, big time publisher, used in a lot of schools around the country.

MILLER: I was his lab assistant for almost the entire time I was in Arizona State.

He was so happy to talk about photos.

You could not get him to stop sometimes.

I'd be like, I, ..I...I got to get to math class, man, I love this story, but... DOUG ANDERSON: He worked with uh electronic cameras in the 1980's, before most places did.

He would put on workshops for the state's working professionals in the 1980's on the use of the electronic camera.

MILLER: I think Frank was one of the very early adopters.

If not adopter, he saw it coming, 'cause he told us about it and we're like, yeah, digital, I don't, you know, we just got to college, like, let me learn the film thing because, you know, Photoshop?

What's that?

CHERYL EVANS: He didn't talk a lot about his past.

Um, he would share other people's works in the class, in the classroom.

He would bring other people to come and talk about photojournalism.

But he didn't talk about his past at The Washington Post.

I knew he had worked there and that's about it.

MILLER: I mean, once I started seeing his photos from the Arizona Documentary Project that he did, and I was just like, oh yeah, you were like a really good photographer back in the day, I forget.

And it took him a while for him to start telling me about uh, his brother.

CHERYL EVANS: Yeah, I didn't even know he had a twin brother, let alone in the same profession.

MILLER: It was always about you or about his friend that he was bringing in or about, "Hey, you see that shot in the paper from the Phoenix Gazette?

You see that, here's, you know, how you could do it."

And he would promote other photographers that were good.

Or a photo that he thought was good.

[Music ends] MILLER: Yeah, I don't, I don't know if I would be doing what I'm doing today without, without Frank.

Honestly, we were kind of on the same page.

I wanted to go to Arizona State University, and I wanted to come out a photojournalist.

Plan A.

There was no plan B.

He got me the internships that I got at the Phoenix Gazette.

And after that, the Arizona Republic.

I wouldn't even have known to do that without him.

To this day, if I get some photo I'm proud of, or something that gets picked up and gets used, one of my first thoughts is always, "Ah man, I wish I could show Frank, man."

[Guitar music] SEAN HOY: I remember going to ASU, and I go, "I'm going to be down there.

Let's eat."

And then him and I are eating.

And I'm like, "Dad, you look terrible.

You seriously look bad."

So, my mom the next morning called me, and she goes, "You need to meet me down here at the hospital, St Luke's.

Dad is in, you know, a coma state."

So, we go down there and sure enough, the doctor comes in and he was talking about, you know, this guy's never gonna...he's got six months or something.

MARY HOY: Years ago, when he first moved out to Arizona, the doctor started telling him, your liver enzymes are high.

Every time you get a blood test, they will tell him that.

But uh, that didn't slow him down.

KATE HOY: He was in denial, complete denial.

He actually lived for three years, and he went to work.

He continued working and continued meeting up with his students and put it aside.

One thing that he made perfectly clear to my mother during this time was he did not want any of his family members contacted.

MARY HOY: And Tom kept calling during that period, but Frank wouldn't take his calls.

KATE HOY: So, by 2001 the disease had already progressed very rapidly.

By the time uh, July came, he was in a coma.

The hospice workers would stay overnight with him and then they would talk with us in the morning and say, "Something's wrong.

You know, he should be passing and he's not."

And the nurse who obviously had been through this before, said, "he's waiting...

He's waiting for something."

MARY HOY: They kept saying, "Frank is waiting for something.

He's waiting for something."

KATE HOY: By this time we're pretty much all camped out at the house.

And I remember when I was leaving the Tempe house where my father was set up, and as I was leaving my shift, going somewhere, Tom drove up.

And he got out of the car, and I'd seen him for the first time and it had to be 40 years.

He just took right over.

He just came up to me, shook his hand.

I knew immediately who he was.

MARY HOY: Tom, you know, just decided he was coming no matter if Frank didn't want him to, or whatever.

KATE HOY: And he went into the house.

He talked to my mother and went over to my father, didn't even hesitate, just went over and sat down by my father's bedside, and he picked up his hand, and just started talking to him.

MARY HOY: We were out in a kitchen, another room, and Tom went in and just talked to him and talked to him and told him about when they were growing up and all the good things.

KATE HOY: The peace that entered that room.

You could feel it.

And you could feel the tension go.

He talked about their happy times and Bob and what they used to do and what their house was like.

And my father just completely... just passed.

I think Tom was there like two or three hours talking to him.

And my father settled down and left.

And we...we just knew, we just knew that he was waiting for his twin.

He had fought that for so long.

And it was just, it was incredible.

It was just incredible.

And Tom stayed for the funeral, and he spoke at the funeral.

He was an amazing person.

Amazing person.

I'm really, really glad I could have met him before he died.

[Sentimental music] VAN RIPER: We always learn something from looking at the people who came before us.

There's the old saying that you're standing on the shoulders of giants.

Well, maybe they weren't giants.

Maybe they were guys who showed up to work and did a good job.

♪♪ [Rock n Roll music plays] ♪ Hold it ♪ ♪ Now ♪