ROWLAND SCHERMAN ’55 AND HIS LIFE BEHIND THE LENS

Filmmaker Chris Szwedo first stumbled upon Scherman’s photographs in a small gallery in Orleans, Massachusetts, but the artist’s work is primarily housed in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., in the Library of Congress and in a newly created special collection in the University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. One of his most well-known portraits, of a back-lit Bob

Dylan playing the harmonica on stage at the Washington Coliseum in 1965, became the album cover for “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits,” and won Scherman the Grammy Award for Best Album Cover in 1967.

When Scherman made that photograph of Dylan, he was working for LIFE magazine, although not actually on assignment. He didn’t even have a press pass that night, he confided during an interview at his home in Massachusetts this summer. What he did have was a camera and what he called “an unshakable desire” to show things the way he saw them. “I couldn’t be stopped. There was no way. I wasn’t going to be stopped from taking a picture. That kind of fire … I had it when I had it,” said Scherman, who is now 85, and still making photographs and showing his work.

This summer, his photographs were featured in a solo exhibition, “Spirit of the ’60s,” at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Scherman said he was surprised and pleased by an observation made by a journalist, John Grenier-Ferris, who interviewed him for The Providence Independent about the show. Grenier-Ferris wrote: “Scherman lived and worked primarily during the 1960s and ’70s, disruptive times reminiscent of today. He could have focused on the darkness: Southern police officers siccing dogs on Black demonstrators, or the drugs and carpetbagger record executives that infiltrated Laurel Canyon. Instead, he showed the world what dignity and fortitude looks like in his images of the march on Washington in 1963, and the innocence that still prevailed in the California music scene with Joni Mitchell and Judy Collins sitting together in a tree house.”

“Scherman,” Grenier-Ferris continued, “portrayed the strength, resilience, joy, and beauty the human race is capable of, and isn’t that something we need to be reminded of now? How sometimes seriously flawed human beings — think of JFK and the contrast between Camelot and Vietnam, for example — could still manage to make the world a better place.”

A Photojournalist for LIFE Magazine

Raised in Pelham, New York, Scherman transferred to what was then The Gunnery as a junior, with the goal of improving his academic standing and college prospects. As he explained: ”My GPA in high school was tumbling because I was chasing girls around and I was supposed to go to Dartmouth.” His father, Bill Scherman, a vice president at Newsweek, graduated from Dartmouth in 1934 and wanted Rowland to play football there. He did play football at Gunn, and took up hockey, soccer, crew, and golf.

His soccer team recorded just one win for the season. “No one knew how to play, except for Alan Bain ’55, our English Exchange student. He was the only one to score,” Scherman recalled. Some of his best memories are of crew. He rowed in the two seat for the third boat in his senior year — the same year Gunn’s first and second boats were named New England Champions under legendary coach Rod

Beebe. “We all wanted to break our backs to make him a winner. He was an inspiring guy.”

In June, Scherman said campus looked much different, but he still remembered his dorm room on the first floor of Gunn, and the friends he made at school, including the late Andy Masterbone, Jr. ’55 and the late Colin E. Smith ’55. He also recalled that he studied art and painted a watercolor of a Cape Cod lighthouse from memory that then-Head of School Ogden D. Miller H’69 P’50 ’54 ’55 GP’84 chose to display in his office.

A Call to Action

After graduating from Gunn, Scherman enrolled at New York University for a year, and then transferred to Oberlin College in Ohio, where he majored in art. He did not graduate, leaving Oberlin to join the U.S. Army, and pursue a brief career as a musician. He recorded a few songs under the name Billy Donahue, including the 1959 hit, “Oo Darling,” which he performed on “American Bandstand.”

By 1961, he had given up his aspirations as a singer and returned to photography. After hearing President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, he made a decision to use his talents as a force for good. When Kennedy spoke the words, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country,” Scherman took it seriously, and felt the president was speaking to him directly. “Absolutely,” he said. “No matter what he wanted us to do, I would have done it.”

Kennedy’s inspiration led him to the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the newly established Peace Corps, where Scherman told organizers he wanted a job as a photographer. What the Peace Corps needed at that time was doctors and teachers, but Scherman was determined and decided to stick around. He caught his big break when he was asked to photograph Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands visiting with Sargent Shriver, the first Director of the Peace Corps, and prospective volunteers. Scherman got the job as the first photographer for the Peace Corps, and began a relationship with the Kennedy family that changed his career.

Traveling with the Peace Corps to St. Lucia, West Africa, and the Far East, Scherman became savvy about how to get his photographs published in the mainstream media. “My job was to photograph not the volunteers but the guys who were running the show. But I knew that was not what the magazines wanted. It was obvious the interesting stuff was what the kids were doing. They were setting up schools, teaching. You’d get the volunteers, and you’d get their class, and the class would get all excited about getting their picture taken. They were all laughing and smiling. How could you miss?”

That face in the crowd

In 1963, Scherman became a freelance photographer. His work appeared in the leading magazines of the time — LIFE, Look, National Geographic, Time — and he became the official photographer for the United States Information Agency (USIA), which dispatched him to cover the March on Washington.

“I had a press pass that said, ‘On official assignment: U.S. Government, March on Washington.’ The only one. I could go anywhere. I did go everywhere,” Scherman said, recalling of the march: “Everyone was aghast at how huge it was. They all thought it was going to be a couple thousand people. No one realized it was going to be that big.”

Despite the size of the crowd — 250,000 people — and the racial tensions of that time, the demonstration was also peaceful, and that was what he sought to capture in his images. “It changed the way the world looked at America in a positive way,” he said.

Scanning the crowd during King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Scherman spotted a young girl. “There she was, listening. Her mother took her to listen to Martin Luther King, Jr. and I thought when I saw that face in the crowd, ‘What a face!’ Click, click. Perfect face. She became the poster child for the March on Washington. Her picture was on flags, on telephone poles, on buses, all over Washington, D.C.”

In 2013, Scherman had an opportunity to meet the young girl in the picture, whose name is Edith Lee-Payne. She told the media that she had attended the march on her 12th birthday with her mother and had no idea that she was the subject of a famous photograph until her cousin showed her the picture in a calendar in 2008. “The BBC tracked me down and tracked her down and put us together by magic at the 50th anniversary of the March,” Scherman said, delighted by the fact that she had become famous. “Park rangers lined up to get their picture taken with her, rather than the other way around. That part was a lot of fun. We still contact each other all the time. We’re pretty tight.”

The Kennedys, The Beatles, and Woodstock

Some years after the Peace Corps, Scherman was invited to photograph an event that Shriver and his wife, Eunice, were hosting at their home. The couple had organized games for their children and invited other local children to participate. “Made my career. I can’t imagine what my life would have been like without doing that, being so smitten by the Kennedy dynasty and mystique,” said Scherman, who also photographed President John F. Kennedy and later, Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. He said it was Szwedo, the documentary filmmaker, who realized years later that the event at the Shrivers’ home was the beginning of the Special Olympics. “I didn’t realize that. I didn’t realize a lot of stuff. I was just doing it because Sarge couldn’t have been nicer,” Scherman said.

In June 1968, Scherman had left Robert Kennedy’s campaign in California to edit his photographs, and then RFK was assassinated. Scherman reflected on the impact of that loss, and others of that period: “As long as we had Bobby and Martin Luther King and John Lennon, everything was going to be alright. That’s how it seemed. Bobby was definitely going to be president. I expected to become a staff member. That didn’t happen.”

His photographs from the campaign “stayed in a drawer for 40 years. When LIFE gave me my negatives back, you could see that everywhere he went, he was adored.”

Throughout the 1960s, Scherman photographed many other events of cultural and historical significance, including the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, where he climbed on stage to capture a young Bob Dylan performing with Joan Baez; the Beatles first concert in the United States, at Washington Coliseum in 1964; and Woodstock in 1969, where he photographed Janis Joplin and Crosby, Stills, and Nash.

For another assignment for LIFE, Scherman accompanied tennis great Arthur Ashe on a road trip in 1965, riding in Ashe’s Ford Mustang from Texas to Los Angeles. Three years later, Ashe became the first Black man to win the U.S. Open. Scherman photographed him on the cusp of fame, casually reading the newspaper while waiting for his clothes in a laundromat, and shaking hands at UCLA with another (much taller) sports legend, who later changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. “That was the first time they’d ever met. They became business partners,” Scherman said, recalling that he was “hugely happy” when Ashe won Wimbledon in 1975.

Preserving his life’s work

Just before the pandemic, Scherman and his partner, Linda Calmes Jones, moved from Cape Cod to Amherst, Massachusetts, at the invitation of Rob Cox, who was then head of Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Massachusetts. Cox wanted to catalog Scherman’s work, including his negatives, to make them more accessible to the public.

“It’s really kind of opened them up to the world and made sure those images are preserved,” said Scherman, who initially planned to teach at UMass while overseeing the archives project. Then COVID hit, and in May 2020, Cox passed away. The Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA), named in his honor, now includes the Rowland Scherman Collection, which spans nearly his entire career.

Asked if he saw himself as a force for good when he was photographing the major events of his time, Scherman replied: “Not as much as I had hoped. I didn’t get a Medal of Freedom. I didn’t get a Pulitzer Prize. I didn’t get into the Magnum Photo group. People are still wondering who I am. I think the movie helped somewhat. It all came so late. I stumbled a lot.”

Scherman moved back to the Cape this summer, not far from the Chatham Orpheum Theater, where “Eye on the Sixties” premiered in 2013. “The reason that we have all of these photographs is that we have this person who lives in the moment,” said Szwedo, who traveled with Scherman during the making of the documentary back to Woodstock and Washington, D.C., and relived with him the moments he made his iconic photographs. “I admire the spirit in anybody who really wants to follow their own star. I would call that person true to themselves.”