A Birthday in Paris

This September I travelled to Paris to celebrate my Big Birthday with family. It was a grand celebration that helped take the sting out of this “growing older” phenomenon. At the end of the week where we explored Paris and ate and drank everything in sight, we drove to Normandy to visit D-Day sites. I had heard from OPC member Ned Parker that there was a monument to fallen journalists in Bayeux that also hosted the Bayeux-Calvados Award for war correspondents.

In a small park setting off the beaten track from the tourist areas of Bayeux there were simple stone monuments, about six-feet high with the names of journalists fallen in the line of duty. People who are included: Ernie Pyle, Anna Politkovskaya, Daniel Pearl and David Kaplan, but I was in search of Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington, the photojournalists who died in Misrata, Libya, and left us bereft on the eve of the OPC’s Awards Dinner in 2011. Their names were on opposite sides of a recently carved stone stele and in a strange way, it was comforting to see their names permanently etched in stone. Then, as I was leaving this quiet garden, I found a small tombstone-like memorial to Robert Capa. Since the OPC has the honor of giving an award to a brave photojournalist every year in the name of Robert Capa, seeing his small, but separate memorial was heart-warming.

Returning to Paris for a second week I visited OPC members and was invited to the new International Herald Tribune offices, recently located to La Defense, by editor Alison Smale, who was a presenter at last year’s awards ceremony. I sat in on the morning editor’s meeting and then met with editorial page editor Serge Schmemann and OPC Vice President Marcus Mabry.

I knew that OPC member Mort Rosenblum resided on a houseboat in Paris, but when he and his wife Jeanette invited me for dinner I realized just what a prime location their boat commanded: on the Seine between Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower. We watched the Eiffel Tower reveal its lightshow while sipping tea after dinner on the deck. The Rosenblums also had another guest, journalist and author Tad Bartimus who now lives in Hawaii with her husband. She was one of the authors of War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam. She had appeared on an OPC panel of those women reporters in September 2002 and it was great fun to meet her again in Paris.

Sonya K. Fry is the Executive Director of the OPC.