A Lively Life at Life
Dave Scherman '36, who has been on the staff of Life Magazine since the first week of its existence, now has a new assignment as editor of the department called Life Reviews. In the January 15 issue, under the heading "From photographer to writer to editor," Managing Editor George P. Hunt had this to say of Editor Dave:
David E. Scherman can build a country house with his own hands, sing the words to any popular song (and all of Gilbert and Sullivan) and strike up such sweet melodies on an ocarina that friends have called him the Heifetz of the sweet potato. He can also do, and in fact has done, just about everything we have to offer around here. Since 1953 he was written articles and countless picture stories. He helped originate the department we now call the Close-up and has produced and written at least 150 of these stories. Now he has taken on the editorship of the Life Reviews.
Dave began his Life career as a photographer. He was born on Coogan's Bluff in New York City ("I've been living on bluff ever since"), graduated from Dartmouth College and joined our staff in 1936, the week the magazine began. His assignments kept him in trouble. By the time the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor he had already survived two light-plane crashes (while covering a flight across America), two airline accidents (in the West Indies and Venezuela) and was covering World War II for us in England. He photographed the first American troops to land in Britain and covered the D-day invasion. He was shot down in Germany in an observation plane, lived through the battles of the Normandy hedgerows, witnessed the liberation of Paris and has the distinction of being the first war photographer to enter Nuremberg, Munich, Dachau and Berchtesgaden. In Munich he discovered Hitler's hideaway villa before the U.S. Army did, and for a week he bathed in Hitler's tub, ate off Hitler's dishes and slept in Hitler's bed.
In the spring of 1941 one of Dave's pictures arrived in the Life office in a shipment of film concealed in a toothpaste tube, a tube of shaving cream and a roll of gauze bandage. It showed the disguised German raider Tamesis approaching the Egyptian liner Zamzam just after shelling the liner and just before sinking her. Scherman, aboard the Zamzam on his way to the war, made the picture from a lifeboat before the Germans boarded. He concealed the film in the tubes and bandage and, after 33 days on a German prison ship, managed to smuggle it to New York. The picture ran in Life (June 23, 1941) and British naval units hunting the unknown raider used it to identify the ship and sink her. In his memoirs, written after the war, the German captain wrote that it was Scherman's picture that did him in.
