Flying the Coop   

At 84, photographer Marty Lederhandler decides it's time to retire from the Associated Press.

The Associated Press loses its longest-serving staff member as photographer Marty Lederhandler retires at the age of 84.

"I've done everything I wanted to," says Lederhandler, whose 66 years at the AP began at age 18, when he followed his brother and became a messenger, running film to the darkroom from photographers covering ball games and fights. If something newsworthy happened while he was working at night when no photographers were around, he recalls, the editors would say, "Marty, grab a camera."

Drafted in 1941, Lederhandler became an Army photographer, covering five battle zones in Europe. He and the other photographers were each given two carrier pigeons to take the film back to England to be developed.

On D-Day, Lederhandler landed on Normandy beach before the Allied troops. After shooting the invasion, he put the film and captions in capsules attached to the pigeons and let them go. No one had told him the birds wouldn't fly home if they were kept in their cages too long. His had been caged three days. When released, they flew inland. Three weeks later, at a captured German post, Lederhandler says, he saw the photos on the front page of a German newspaper, with his photo credit and a caption that said U.S. troops were destroyed on the beaches of France.

He returned to the AP after his discharge and in 1947 became a staff photographer.

"Although I've covered South America, the Kennedys boating in Hyannis, Arafat and every U.N. secretary-general," Lederhandler says, his favorite place to photograph is New York City.

In 1967, Lederhandler caught Queen Elizabeth II nervously pulling up the shoulder straps of her dress at a dinner in New York. In the early 1990s, he won three major awards for a photo of 10 Santas helping an elderly man whose bike was hit by a car. His picture of the Empire State Building with the World Trade Center towers burning in the background made the cover of New York magazine and the cover of a book of photographs about the September 11 attacks.

But Lederhandler's favorite photograph is of Nikita Khruschev hugging Fidel Castro at the 15th U.N. General Assembly in 1960.

Lederhandler says he could work for one more year. But it's harder to lug cameras and equipment around New York in the winter. It was time, he says, to retire.

He plans to publish his collection of photos. He wants to learn French because France is one of his favorite places to photograph.

"Ahhh, it's been a long time," Lederhandler sighs. "It's your whole life. You can't turn your back and walk away from it so easily. But I have nothing more to prove. I've done enough, don't you think?"

Edited by Kathryn S. Wenner