February 5, 2002

As a reporter, I loved working with photographer Don Cadorette. He wore a ponytail, he chain-smoked, his cowboy boots were scuffed and in desperate need of new heels. His blue jeans always needed knee patches. He spoke in a gravely voice. His heart was as big as the Montana sky. He won an Emmy Award once for his television photography. He took a blowtorch, cut the top of the figurine off and made it into a hood ornament for his broken down pickup truck.

Children, old people and the desperately down-and-out-living-on-the-margins kind of people adored him. Don and I did lots of stories with those kinds of people.

Don and I were working in the smoky stench of the Guatemala City garbage dump in January 1989. We were shooting a documentary about the starving and abandoned children who lived there. Don spotted a mother; dirt caked on her face and a filthy crying child slung across her chest hidden in a cocoon of a tattered piece of cloth.

I asked the woman, "How did you get here to the garbage dump." In my deepest reporter voice, I asked some question about who in the government should help. Don, looked out from behind his camera lens from three feet behind me growled, "Ask her what she eats."

"What do you eat?" I asked.

The woman looked surprised at the question. The answer, to her, seemed obvious. "We eat the trash," she said.

I wanted to drop the microphone and shrink away. I had become so detached from reality that I had only seen this starving woman as an interview. Don saw her as a starving person.

From that day forward, I tried to never do an interview without asking my photojournalist partner what he would ask in the interview. I tried never to conclude an interview without turning to my partner to ask him if there were any questions to add.

Don was always pushing me to go deeper, not wider, in our reporting. Instead of doing the story of the AIDS epidemic, he documented the agonizingly slow death of a man named Purl who died of AIDS. Purl was flamboyant and our viewers in Nashville might have dismissed his death as being a "gay thing" had Don not produced such an intimate and caring profile that put a face and a cost on this death. It aired as an hour-long primetime documentary.

For more than a year, Don documented the life of "Leonard" an impoverished, mentally diminished old man whose only mission in life was to care for his wife Sarah. When Sarah grew too sick for Leonard to care for, state social workers removed and hospitalized her. Leonard was devastated and alone. After his documentary aired, "do-gooders," as Don called them, came by Leonard's house with food and good wishes. Weeks later, nobody was coming by, and Don showed us that not only was the food all gone, but some of the neighbors had stolen some of the donations.

Don coached and taught me so many things about being a journalist:

-The reporter is not the story. The story is the story. I swear it is true that Don would wait until my hair was sticking straight up, then ask me to say something on camera, in what TV people call a "stand-up." That is the part where reporters stand in front of the camera holding a microphone and speak. Later, Don would profess to not having noticed that my hair was standing straight up, knowing there was no chance I would use the standup in the story. Instead, we would use more images of the people, and my standup would end up on the edit room floor.

-Focus-Focus-Focus. On the way to a story, he would ask questions and say things to guide my interviewing. "What do you think is interesting about this person? "I don't want to know what they know, I want to know how they feel about what they know." At the end of a long day of shooting he would ask "Tell me what did you see and hear today." It was his way of helping me crunch down the main two or three thoughts I had about the story. Narrow and deep is better than wide and thin he would coach me.

- Invest time with the main subject before you roll tape. Don would ask, "How much time can you give me to be with them before I start shooting?" He loved to ask questions that nobody else asked. "What would your best friend say about you?" He would ask children to draw pictures for him. I have seen him pick up crayons and draw with children, chatting away while he sat on the floor and colored with them.

-Make it clear that you are always a journalist. Don taught me to be sure the subject is always clear that we are journalists. Anything they said on tape was on the record. If the subject would ask him to do them a favor or to ignore something they said or did, he would remind them that he was a journalist and he was there to tell a story. So many times he reminded me that the best favor we could do for any subject was to ask "Questions that the viewer would ask. If you go soft, the viewer will not believe you, then you are wasting everyone's time."

-Get closer. Once Don and I watched a PBS documentary about abortion. This remarkable piece included a half dozen or more women who allowed a camera to be with them when they underwent the procedure. After that, Don never allowed me to say that I could not find somebody who would not let us get close. "Remember the doc," he would say, "somebody will talk, we just have to work harder."

-Shut up and Listen. The worst scolding I remember getting from Don would be when he thought I was not listening to the subject. He lectured me to ask a question and then wait for the answer. Sometimes wait 30 seconds without saying anything. Just be quiet. Then when they do answer, wait some more. Often, he said, people would answer your question and if you don't respond, they will repeat their answer only with more force because they didn't think you heard them.

-The non-question question. We spent the better part of three weeks in a county jail holding facility doing a project on plea-bargaining. Don was focused on a repeat offender prostitute who had come through the jail three times in three weeks. As she stood in her cell, she said to him,"It's a pretty lonely place to be. I like it here, except for being away from my children." He made it safe for her to talk about such a private hole in her life without ever asking a question.

-Give me time to shoot and edit. Too many reporters rush their photojournalism partners. They order them to shoot this and shoot that and they tell their partner "we have enough, let's go." Don taught me the importance of honoring the power of pictures. Give your partner time to do the job professionally. That includes giving time to light, properly place microphones and edit once we get back. Don would do anything, skip meals, leave at any hour of the morning for an assignment; all he asked in return was for his reporter partner to give him time to do his job well.

-Help me carry it-The tools of television weigh a lot. Reporters must be willing to help carry the load. Photojournalists keep a 25-pound camera and 30 or so pounds of gear strapped to their bodies for hours at a stretch. Don put it simply, "If I am too tired to shoot, you are not going to get what you need." Made sense to me. It was very different from handing me a bunch of gear and saying "Here, carry this."

-Learn the craft of photography even if you are do not plan to be a photographer. Don taught me how to light interviews and scenes. He wanted me to know how so I would appreciate a great job and so I could help set up or hold lights if we were working in a hurry. "The difference between home movies and professional photography is lighting," he said.

-Stay away from the crowd. Don used to call the cop beat reporters "holster sniffers." He made fun of the reporters who thrived on news conferences and press releases. If everyone else was covering the story, he would do all he could to get out of the assignment. "Let's go find the real story, let somebody else shoot the news conference," he would say.

-Don't act like you are on TV. I came to learn that this is Don Cadorette's most important message. It is part of the reason why he wore long hair, why he wore worn out boots. In 1990, Don and I won a Robert F. Kennedy Award for our work in Guatemala. We were invited to Ethel Kennedy's house in McLean, Virginia, for a ceremony and dinner. I spent the evening with the "suits." Don passed through the room, grabbed something to eat and spent most of the rest of the evening in a food service area of the house, talking with the kitchen help and smoking cigarettes with the servers. As we left the house that night, the "suits" wished me well but didn't know me from Adam's house cat. The hired help called Don by name and bummed one more cigarette from him.

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