Multiple exposure photograph of LIFE photographer Frank Scherschel smoking & handling a camera, running & crouching as he would do on assignment. (Photo by Gjon Mili/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation)
At age 14, he ran errands for a photo agency in Chicago. “Instead of going to high school and college, I learned psychology convincing murderers and divorcees caught with the other man to pose for pictures.” By 19 he managed The Milwaukee Journal’s photo department and several years later he took in his orphaned little brother, Joe, who would also become a LIFE photographer. During World War II, Frank took pictures from bombers flying missions over Germany and islands of the Pacific. At the Normandy invasion, as one of the magazine’s six accredited photographers, he again shot from the air. “We thought it was going to be murder but it wasn’t,” he said. “To show you how easy it was, I ate my bar of chocolate. In every other operational trip, I sweated so much the chocolate they gave us melted in my breast pocket.” He later retired to his wife’s Wisconsin hometown to open a camera store.
—Adapted from The Great LIFE Photographers
A scene from the Grand Canal: Peggy Guggenheim on her roof. (Photo by Frank Scherschel/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation)
Representatives of 14 NATO nations (including US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (fore, far R) signing a pact admitting Germany as 15th member in a ceremony at Palais de Chaillot. (Photo by Frank Scherschel/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation)
American glider troops’ airborne unit on parade at an airfield before Eisenhower’s D-Day invasion during WWII. (Photo by Frank Scherschel/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation)
