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I spent the next 11 years in Jackson covering the statehouse, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, famine in Somalia, embedded with the 82nd Airborne in the first Gulf War and many other assignments.
I transferred to Atlanta under Gene Blythe and Gary Clark in 1994 as preparations for the Atlanta Olympics were getting underway.
I followed my wife to New York in 1996 when she accepted a morning anchor position with CBS News network. I departed the AP in the spring of 1997 during the start of the State Photo Center in Washington.
Following my time at the AP, I freelanced for Reuters and AFP. Around 1999 during a phone conversation with the late Hal Buell, he mentioned that Claudia DiMartino was starting the Bloomberg photo service. I started shooting for her the next day and continued until 2005.
In 2003 AFP and Getty Images began their cooperation and AFP stopped using freelancers. I switched over to the European Pressphoto Agency (EPA) and they put me on staff in 2005. I became North American deputy director in 2012. With EPA I covered news, sports, politics, etc., I departed EPA when they decided it was time for me to retire in 2023 and have shot for AFP, AFP Video, and UPI since then.
I am now semi-retired, a licensed drone pilot, and shoot occasional MLB baseball and NFL football games.
He can still hear clatter of Victor Simpson hunting and pecking away at his keyboard
Steve Wilson - What a wonderful tribute to Victor Simpson by my friend and former AP Rome colleague Fran D’Emilio in yesterday’s issue of Connecting. Her words motivated me to add some of my own personal memories of a man who became a mentor and dear friend.
Victor was the AP news editor in Rome when I transferred there from New Delhi in 1986. Less than a year had passed since the terror attack at Rome’s Fiumicino airport in which Victor and his son, Michael, were wounded and his young daughter, Natasha, killed.
I arrived in Rome filled with trepidation, unsure what state of mind Victor would be in and how I would fit in.
I needn’t have worried.
Victor was the most welcoming and helpful person imaginable, both inside and outside the newsroom. He and his beloved wife, Daniela Petroff, went out of their way to make me feel at home in a city where I didn’t yet know how to speak the native language.
They invited me to dinner at one of their favorite restaurants near the Spanish Steps and offered sage advice on how to manage the (many) complexities of daily life in Rome and Italy.
Over time, I visited Victor and Daniela at their Fregene beach club outside Rome and at their apartment in the mountains of Alto Adige in northern Italy. The couple embraced life in Italy and reveled in sharing it with others.
In the AP newsroom in Rome’s Piazza Grazioli, I marveled at Victor’s sharp news sense and his skill at cutting through the clutter and getting straight to the news angle. He took great pleasure in finding the right lede and invariably did. When I wrote stories, Victor would work with me on crafting the lede, whether for a simple news brief or an AAA wire digest story.
Victor taught me how to untangle Italy’s fractious political scene and report on a string of revolving-door governments. But it was in covering the Vatican where Victor was most in his element. More than anyone in the Vatican press corps, he knew how to decipher the news and make sense of it. I watched, listened and learned from the best.
Victor gave me the opportunity to cover major papal stories, including traveling with Pope John Paul II on several trips to Africa and reporting on the Polish pope’s historic meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989.
Away from the intrigue of Vatican politics, Victor was a sports lover. He still followed his favorite New York teams but was a passionate fan of Italian Serie A soccer club Roma. An avid skier, Victor would stop whatever he was doing in the office to watch television coverage of a young Alberto Tomba’s World Cup and Olympic races.
Tennis was also one of Victor’s passions. When I would cover the Italian Open tennis tournament, he delighted in coming out to watch some of the matches. There, Victor would charm and regale Bud Collins and other members of the traveling press corps with his tales of life in Italy and coverage of the pope. One year, Victor and I had a blast teaming up to cover Wimbledon as part of the AP team.
In all, I spent six years in Rome working with Victor. We stayed in touch on a regular basis over the decades, catching up by phone on the latest sports news and updating each other on our families. We last met in person a few years ago over a delicious meal at one of his favorite restaurants in Milan.
There are so many memories to cherish, but this will always stand out:
After filing his latest story, Victor would get me to drop whatever I was doing and join him for a quick trip to a bustling café on the corner of Piazza Venezia. Standing at the counter, he would crack a joke or talk over the next lede and gulp down a strong espresso. He’d then hustle back to the office, sit down at his desk and hunt and peck on the keyboard with a familiar, loud clatter.
I can still hear it.
‘Silly challenges’ challenge met with silence – oh, come on, surely you’ve got one
Henry Bradsher - Obviously, readers were more bemused than simply amused by the piece that our hard-working Connecting compiler featured a couple of weeks ago about my silly challenges.
If anyone actually read it, they would have seen that I suggested, "if they're nutty enough to get involved", that they might offer some silly challenges or me to add to my repertoire.
But so far, nary a single response, not even wondering how far I'm declining into 95-year-old dementia. Or offering other silly challenges that I might try.
Instead, stunning silence. Is that proof that no one is nutty enough?
But, perchance, has anyone picked up on any of my silliness practices, just for the heck ot it? Such as, perhaps, when getting ready for bed, tossing the first off sock some distance and then seeing if the second one can be tossed to hit it. A silly exercise to enliven life.
Ah, well. I'll continue to practice my own silliness, to complement many other activities, and hope that the world continues to revolve not too heatedly.
Darlene Love's shoutout to AP
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