A conversation with Judy Polumbaum, author of All Available Light: The Life and Legacy of Photographer Ted Polumbaum (McFarland Press, July 2021)
How did your father become a photojournalist?
The short version: He was propelled by principle, conscience, indignation, foolhardiness, the need to make a living, and my mother.
The longer version: My dad had a photography hobby as a kid – one of his few pursuits that his aloof businessman father actually encouraged. But Ted Polumbaum never planned to make photography his life's work. He wanted to be a news reporter.
After college, he worked for a great little newspaper in Pennsylvania, the York Gazette and Daily, known as a training ground for journalists headed to bigger places. My mother, Nyna Brael Polumbaum, hated York, which unlike its forward-thinking daily was a hidebound place, so they stayed only two years before returning back north. New York newspapers were merging and laying off veteran staffers, so no luck there. Ted found a mind-numbing job in Boston that seemed like it might lead to something better, writing news copy and editing photos for an outfit called Acme Newspictures, which soon got bought by United Press. My dad's main job at UP was rewriting wire stories into the evening newscast for television – a medium so new that my parents didn't even own a TV.
In the spring of 1953, a federal marshal came huffing up the steps to their second-floor apartment in a near-in suburb to deliver a subpoena from the US House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). It directed my father to report to Washington, D.C., to testify at hearings on "Communist subversion in education."
This was the so-called McCarthy period – but Joe McCarthy, who was looking increasingly unhinged and would be defanged within another year or so, was the least of it. HUAC had started much earlier, lasted much longer, and ruined far more lives. The dragnet had snagged my dad because, as a student at Yale after World War II, he'd joined the John Reed Club, an innocuous group whose main activity was inviting radical speakers to campus. It was on the list of supposedly dangerous organizations.
Ted reported to the hearings with a lawyer, and confronted the Committee in a performance that then looked reckless and now looks heroic. He took the Fifth Amendment (a more effective defense against these inquisitions than the First) and refused to answer questions about his political beliefs and associations; and he accused the congressmen (they were all men) of trampling on the Bill of Rights and subjecting him to trial by publicity. His defiance made the New York Daily News and The New York Times.
United Press promptly fired him. He was 28, married, with one daughter and another on the way (I was in the womb), and needed a new job. Dogged by the blacklist, trailed by the FBI, Ted decided to be upfront about his situation, and most interviews came to naught – except one prospect, writing catalog copy for a new outfit called Radio Shack. "That's what we want, a guy with balls!" the interviewers told him. The strong-willed Nyna knew he'd hate the job and insisted he decline.
So he returned to his childhood passion, which he'd never entirely set aside. He already had a good credential: The year before his HUAC appearance, he'd won a New England photo contest for his images of picturesque Trappist monks at a monastery in Western Massachusetts. The prize was a future exhibit at the deCordova Museum outside Boston. To its credit, the museum came through even after the hearings, despite Ted's newfound notoriety. He stepped up his picture-taking, showed his portfolio around, and entered the freelancing world.
Meanwhile, the Newspaper Guild took up Ted's case, a welcome show of gumption in those intimidating times. The dispute dragged through arbitration and into court, where a judge friendly to United Press upheld the firing on a technicality (even though UP's own review of Ted's scripts from a period when the Korean War dominated the news had found no bias).
By then, three years had passed, and Ted's new career was taking off. His big break was LIFE magazine; founder Henry Luce, ignoring the blacklist, had empowered his editors to enlist the best talent money could buy. As a regular stringer for Time Inc. and other media, Ted would go on to complete about 400 assignments for LIFE, and hundreds more for Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, Look, The Saturday Evening Post, The New York Times and its Sunday Magazine, and many other publications.
I originally thought of titling my book about my father's life and legacy Photographic Justice. Indeed, the good guy emerged with his integrity intact and a gratifying new career at which he excelled.