Interesting how #RichardStolley, had held several roles for Life Magazine which ran photos from the footage of Abe Zapruder.

Jobs Richard Stolley held
Stolley began his career with Life in 1953.
He subsequently held a number of roles at the magazine, including

• reporter
• bureau chief
• senior editor
• assistant managing editor.

Life magazine published photos from the Zapruder film, which captured the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963:

• November 29, 1963: The magazine published about 30 black and white frames from the film.
• December 6, 1963: The magazine published color frames in a special "John F. Kennedy Memorial Edition".
• October 2, 1964: The magazine published a special article on the film and the Warren Commission report, along with photos.
• November 25, 1966: The magazine published photos from the film.
• November 24, 1967: The magazine published photos from the film.

Life magazine editor Richard Stolley purchased the film from Abraham Zapruder, who recorded the assassination on his home movie camera. Zapruder insisted that frame 313, which shows the fatal shot to the president's head, be excluded from publication.
The original Zapruder film is part of the Kennedy Collection at the National Archives at College Park.

He offered Zapruder $50,000 for the print rights — a sum increased a week later to $150,000 for all rights pertaining to the silent, 26-second, 486-frame colour footage. He promised that Life would not use frame number 313, which showed Kennedy’s head exploding as the bullet hit it. Zapruder agreed, and Stolley walked away with one of the great journalistic scoops of the 20th century.

It's important to note that Stolley was a twin.

Stolley always attached particular importance to People’s cover picture as a means of boosting newsstand sales. “Young is better than old,” he decreed. “Pretty is better than ugly. Rich is better than poor. TV is better than music. Music is better than movies. Movies are better than sport. Anything is better than politics. And nothing is better than the celebrity dead.”

He learnt that formula after failing to put Elvis Presley on the cover following his death at the age of 42 in 1977. That was, by his own admission, one of his biggest mistakes. Three years later he put John Lennon on the cover after his murder in New York, and that became one of People’s bestselling issues.

As for the Zapruder film, Life eventually returned the rights to his family for $1, and in 1999 the US government paid them $16 million for the original film, which now resides in the National Archives. Frame number 313 was not seen by the American public until Geraldo Rivera broadcast it on his show in 1975, 12 years after Kennedy’s assassination.

https://www.geraldstiebel.com/2019/06/richard-brockway-stolley.html

He and his twin brother, Jim, decided that before going on to university they would join the Navy. His brother remained in the States during his enlistment, but Dick was on a ship in the Mediterranean. He got out in 1948 and went to the journalism school at Northwestern while his twin went to MIT as an engineering student. Dick wrote a wonderful sad article about losing his twin in 2014.

While they were in the Navy their family moved to Peekskill New York so, of course, Dick got a job with the Peekskill Evening Star. Wherever Dick went he found the local newspaper and since Northwestern was in Chicago he went to work at the Chicago Sun Times. Yet his career really kicked off and he came into his own when he joined Time, Inc. with its dozen or so publications.

He stayed the longest with Life magazine with four years in Atlanta, Georgia as Bureau Chief, then four years in Los Angeles, another four in Washington D.C. and finally as Bureau Chief in Paris covering all of Europe.

As soon as the President was shot Dick got a call from Time-Life headquarters to get to Dallas. Bringing a fellow writer and photographer he was able to get on a commercial flight that landed just as Air Force One was getting ready to take off with the body of JFK.

Life had a stringer in Dallas who had just left the police department to go home to feed her child when she got a phone call from the department saying that there was a video of the shooting. She told Dick it was taken by Abraham Zapruder, a woman’s clothing manufacturer with offices around the corner from Dealey Plaza. He had run out with his Bell & Howell movie camera to film the President driving by. The bloody results were far from his plan. It was evening by then, Stolley looked up Zapruder’s number in the phone book. and asked if he could come right over. Zapruder told him they should meet in his office the next morning at 9am. Dick arrived at 8.

Other Journalists showed up at 9 but Dick had already seen the film which Zapruder had sent out to Kodak for duplication. Dick did not want to see it again so he waited in another office. Of course, all the other journalists wanted the film and were furious to learn that Zapruder was in negotiations with Dick. When one of them started banging on the door of the office where he and Dick were speaking, Zapruder had it and accepted the offer of $50,000 that was on the table. The police received a copy of the film and Dick took 2 copies with him, expediting one to Time-Life headquarters. There was no time to publish in color, so the issue came out in black and white. The negotiations had only been for the rights to the stills, but when legendary publisher Henry Luce saw the video, he said they had to have it. Dick was sent back to negotiate all rights for $150,000, a princely sum for the time. It was , however, considered too gruesome to show on the big screen or TV so little use was made of it. The Warren Commission reported their finding 11 months later and here is an image of the Life Magazine cover with some Zapruder images.

My favorite anecdote was about a brief interview he had with President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) when he was sent from Los Angeles to his new post in to Washington D.C. I want you to read this in Dick’s own words, “Two writers at Life were doing a story about LBJ and Texas and had a few questions which they hoped I could get answers to. I asked to see him, and press secretary Bill Moyers agreed to ask the President to speak briefly to me in a small office next to the Oval Office in the White House. I asked him the few questions. I was embarrassed, so I sort of sat there with the President staring at me, at which point, he punched my arm, and said, ‘Come on, boy, you’ve got the President of the United States here. Ask me some questions!’ I mumbled a few questions and fled as soon as I could.” When I heard this I could just hear that Texas drawl!

Dallas businessman Abraham Zapruder had set up his 8 mm projector on a little stand in a small, windowless room at his company’s office on Dealey Plaza early on the morning of Nov. 23, 1963.

The limousine reappears from behind a sign, and “suddenly the film shows Kennedy with both fists jammed into his throat,” Stolley said. “Then the right top of the president’s head spurts up into the air.”

There was a collective “ugh” from Stolley and the two agents.

“I realized what an unbelievable piece of film this was,” Stolley said. “I had no idea what else was available, but I knew Life had to have it.”

After they watched the film, Stolley and the grim-faced Secret Service agents left the room without saying anything to one another.

Other reporters showed up, and Zapruder screened the film for them. While waiting for him to finish, Stolley passed the time talking to Zapruder’s assistant, Lillian Rogers. She was from Taylorsville, a small town in southern Illinois. He knew the town. At age 15, Stolley had begun covering high school sports for the Pekin Daily Times, his hometown newspaper. During his last year on the job, Taylorsville had won the state football championship. “I raved about the team, and she beamed,” Stolley said.

When the screening was over, everyone gathered in the hallway, and Zapruder announced, “Mr. Stolley was the first to contact me, so I feel I should talk to him first.”

“The others went nuts,” Stolley said.

He and Zapruder went into the office and began negotiating. “I tried to figure out if he knew what he had,” Stolley said. At first he tried a low figure, suggesting that for something as unusual as the Zapruder film, Life might pay, say, $5,000.

But Stolley quickly realized that Zapruder “knew what he had, and I knew he knew what he had.”

Zapruder, a fan of the president, “kept saying he didn’t want the film to be exploited,” Stolley said. Before they settled on a price, Zapruder recounted a dream he had had the previous night, in which he was in Times Square, and a guy on the sidewalk was urging him to come inside and “watch the president being shot.” Zapruder said he woke up shuddering.

As the two men spoke, other reporters were banging on the door, passing notes under it and shouting. Some went outside and used pay phones to dial Zapruder’s office. A few were abusive toward Rogers when she answered the phone.

When the negotiations reached $50,000, the amount Stolley was approved to spend for print rights to the film, there was a hard banging at the door, and Zapruder looked at him and said, ‘Let’s do it.’ ”

Stolley borrowed Zapruder’s typewriter to peck out a nine-line contract, using language proposed by the magazine’s New York lawyers. Zapruder’s business partner, Erwin Schwartz, and Rogers witnessed the contract granting rights to first public use of the images, and Zapruder handed Stolley the film.

Knowing what was waiting for him outside, Stolley asked, “Have you got a back door?”

He sneaked out of the building, unnoticed by other members of the news media, and went immediately to his hotel, where a courier was standing by to rush the film to the plant in Chicago where Life and other Time Inc. magazines were printed. Photo editors from the New York office were waiting. They selected 22 frames for the next issue. They did not choose the graphic shot in frame 313.

“I’m not sure I would have agreed with that,” Stolley said. “The horror of the moment needed to be shown. But the editors felt they couldn’t do that to the family, or show Jackie crawling on the trunk [after the fatal shot].”

Stolley’s coup probably had something to do with the way he presented himself — a suit and tie, a calm and thoughtful manner, said Hal Wingo, a colleague from People magazine, who also lives in Santa Fe.

Life’s coverage of the assassination was the magazine’s “finest hour,” Wingo said recently, and “the crowning achievement of Dick’s long career. … It’s the most famous piece of film in history, and everybody wanted it. He got it because he handled himself well.”

But Life’s prestige also was a factor. The magazine was then in its heyday, printing 6 million to 7 million copies a week. And Zapruder respected it. “In the end, that was what won the day as much as anything else,” Stolley said.

A handshake

By midday Sunday, two days after the assassination, Life’s editors in New York had seen a copy of the film and had instructed Stolley to go back and buy all rights to the film. Zapruder agreed to meet with him Monday morning in the office of his lawyer. CBS newsman Dan Rather was sitting in the lobby. Minutes later, Rather was describing the film on CBS radio.

The negotiations went quickly. Life agreed to pay $150,000 for all rights to the film. Later, Stolley said, there was a five-page, single-spaced legal agreement. But that Monday, they just shook hands.

Life had agreed to pay Zapruder in $25,000 installments, for tax reasons.

Then the conversation turned to anti-Semitism. Zapruder, a Jew who had emigrated from Russia in 1920 to New York’s garment district, worried that he would face trouble when news spread that he had sold the film to Life. He wanted to deflect some criticism. His lawyer, Sam Passman, suggested he give the first $25,000 installment to the widow and children of J.D. Tippett, the Dallas police officer killed by Lee Harvey Oswald after the latter shot the president.

https://wp.twinsfoundation.com/2014/04/the-end-of-us/

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/article/richard-stolley-obituary-r7k2sklvh