Portrait of photographer Walter B. Lane with his camera around his neck. (Photo by Alice Heidel /The LIFE Images Collection)
During World War II, his local draft board gave Walter Lane (1913-1996) a three-month reprieve to take a freighter to Iceland for a LIFE assignment on American soldiers based there. Then it was off to the Navy for almost four years. He returned to cover Washington, D.C., and recalled how President Harry Truman, posing with a gift crate of strawberries, asked Lane if he liked them, and then tossed one into Lane’s mouth: “He peels one and popped it. The other photographers just stood there. Darn it—not one of them took a picture.”
—Adapted from The Great LIFE Photographers
A new group of POW’s arriving at the Eustis Railroad for POW’s to begin their orientation program during WWII. (Photo by Walter B. Lane/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation)
View of illuminated office windows in a section of the Lafayette Building (also known as Export-Import Bank Building), Washington DC, 1946. (Photo by Walter B. Lane/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation)
Dr. Albert Einstein testifying on behalf of the un-restricted Jewish immagration to Palestine before the Anglo American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine. (Photo by Walter B. Lane/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation)
