ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 7, 1996 TAG: 9604050137
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: OKLAHOMA CITY
SOURCE: JULIA PRODIS ASSOCIATED PRESS
A figure rushed out of the rubble of the federal building. ``I have a critical infant! I have a critical infant!'' He thrust the baby into the arms of firefighter Chris Fields.
Blood and dust covered the baby's head, her yellow undershirt and little white socks. It was a girl, a toddler not much younger than Chris's own son.
He checked for a pulse on the soft flesh under the baby's arm. Nothing. He listened for some sound of life, leaning so close his red helmet grazed the child's forehead. Nothing. He brushed his cheek against the baby's gray lips, hoping to sense even the softest of breaths. Nothing.
He pulled back a bit and gazed at the dead child cradled in his arms. This is somebody's baby, he thought. And if nothing else happens this day, somebody's baby has died.
At this very moment, two amateur photographers, standing just three feet apart but unaware of each other, focused their cameras and clicked.
Within hours, the image seared into the world's consciousness. Like famous photographs before it - the girl weeping over a body at Kent State, the lone protester defying a tank in Tiananmen Square - the photo defined a monumental moment in history. A moment one year ago, on April 19, 1995, when an act of domestic terrorism killed 169 people in the American heartland.
The photograph also inextricably linked the lives of the fireman, the two photographers and the baby's mother. And it changed each of them, in different ways, forever.
Each one has the picture, and where each one keeps it is revealing.
The mother, Aren Almon, keeps a poster-size painting of the image in a bedroom she has turned into a shrine to her dead daughter. It looms over the room like it does her life.
Firefighter Fields keeps a life-size version he received from a well-wisher tucked in the back of a coat closet behind a jumble of old shoes.
Charles Porter IV, a bank employee who sold his photo to The Associated Press, keeps his negative in a safe deposit box.
Lester ``Bob'' LaRue, a gas company worker whose photo appeared on the cover of Newsweek, has entrusted his negatives to lawyers.
Losing control
Aren Almon awoke and rubbed her eyes, puffy and red from crying. It was morning in her grandmother's house the day after her baby was killed, and overnight, the lively 22-year-old with sparkling blue eyes and an athletic figure had turned sallow and frail.
Her own apartment, a block from the federal building, was filled with shattered glass. The blast had blown everything from the walls except the portraits of her baby.
Aren wandered into her grandmother's living room and picked up the Daily Oklahoman. There, on the front page, was a photograph of a firefighter holding a limp child. Much of the child's face was obscured, but she knew just the same. It was Baylee, who had just turned 1.
It was a sight she had avoided the day before, at St. Anthony's Hospital, when she asked her father to identify the body. But here it was on the front page of her local paper.
She collapsed on the couch. Her parents rushed to her side and sobbed with her.
She sat up and looked again at the photo, closer this time. There was something soothing about it. The firefighter looked at Baylee so tenderly, held her so gently in his strong hands.
Aren needed someone strong, too. She couldn't count on the child's father, a summer love two years ago. They met at the Oklahoma State Fair. She was swinging on the Pirate Ship ride when she spotted the young, handsome Marine. A few months later, what she thought was an appendicitis was a pregnancy.
``Thanks for trapping me!'' he said when she called to tell him.
``You're welcome!'' she retorted and hung up. He left town and she gave birth to Baylee alone.
Aren put the newspaper down and took a deep breath.
By mid-morning, the phone was ringing non-stop. Reporters from everywhere wanted interviews.
A local TV station arranged for Aren to meet the firefighter, an emotional meeting perfect for the evening news.
``Thank you,'' was about all she could say to Chris before breaking down again.
``If you need anything,'' he said, ``just call and I'll help.''
Five days later, as her limo pulled away from the cemetery, she saw Chris and his wife through the window. Stop, she told the driver. She jumped out and hugged him. Chris made his promise again.
One night, when her sorrow was too great to bear, she called him. He rushed over to the hotel where she was staying, still wearing a baseball uniform from an intramural game. She collapsed in his arms as her parents stood in the doorway, watching and weeping.
In the weeks and months to follow, Aren called Chris two or three times a week. The fire station dispatcher came to recognize her voice.
When Chris dropped by to check on her, he often would find her listless, medicated with prescription drugs for depression, anxiety and insomnia.
Aren found comfort in condolence letters. Many were addressed only to ``the mother of the baby in the firefighter's arms.'' More than 2,000 poured in from as far away as England, Australia and Guam. Some included poetry and Scripture, but nearly all contained money - more than $50,000 in all.
She spent her days writing thank you notes and was grateful to be busy. But she felt out of control living in the hotel, where nothing around her belonged to her, and where her parents, also displaced by the bombing, lived in the adjoining suite.
The money gave her the chance to take control of her life. With it, she paid cash for a $28,000 house and a $24,000 purple Ford Explorer. A two-door, she decided; four doors are for mothers.
She joined a gym and kept regular appointments at a tanning booth and manicurist. She went back to work for a few days, but found she wasn't ready.
She needed more time to grieve, to pull her life back together.
But every time she thought she could forget for just a day, just an hour, reporters called for her reaction to new developments in the case. And she could never escape the photograph. It was on magazine covers in grocery stores, on plaster statues in Fourth of July festival souvenir stands, on commemorative coins, lapel pins, even phone calling cards.
She had gladly granted some interviews and even given her blessing for some uses of the photograph, but now everything was reeling out of control. The photograph of her child was coming to symbolize the tragedy, and both she and other victims' families were starting to resent it.
Aren isn't the only one who lost a child in bombing, she heard one woman say on TV. Why should Aren get all the publicity - and most of the donations?
At a gathering of victims' relatives, the mother of another dead child turned to Aren and said, ``We don't have to write as many thank-you notes as you do.''
Sometimes, Aren wished Baylee had died in a car accident. At least there wouldn't be all this resentment, all this publicity.
Sleep became her sanctuary. Even the nightmares about someone stealing Baylee's coffin from the cemetery were better than missing Baylee when she was awake.
She doubled her medication - seven bottles of pills and inhalers lined her nightstand. The drugs were making her paranoid, her parents thought. One night, she called 911 three times when she thought she heard a prowler outside.
One evening, she turned on the TV news and saw the picture again - this time on the front of a T-shirt. She grabbed her purse, jumped in her car and headed straight for the T-shirt shop. She pulled one off the rack and was sickened. The transferred image on the cotton shirt made the blood on Baylee's head appear all the more red.
She could just imagine it: 10 years from now seeing someone on the street wearing a faded shirt with a picture of her dead baby on it.
She went to the front counter, shirt in hand, and demanded they be removed from the racks.
The store owner went to the back office and called the man who had made the shirts - the photographer, Lester LaRue. Then the owner walked back to the counter and told Aren: Lester wants to talk to you. He's on his way.
Money talks
Lester ``Bob'' LaRue, safety coordinator for the Oklahoma Natural Gas Co. was in his office when he heard the blast. Worried it might be a pipeline explosion, he jumped in his company car and followed the smoke. The company camera was under the front seat.
Through the viewfinder he kept pressed to his face, Lester witnessed the entire tragedy. He saw the dazed, bloody victims with shrapnel wounds weaving down the streets of shattered glass, but he refrained from taking their pictures.
It was an issue of respect. He didn't want to invade their privacy and exploit their suffering. Instead, he took photos of the gaping federal building, firefighters putting out car fires, rescue workers setting up triage units.
Suddenly, in his viewfinder, a policeman handed a child to a fireman. As the fireman gazed down at the child, Lester took the picture.
It was the kind of intrusive picture he had been avoiding, but the amateur photographer's instincts took over. The image was imprinted on his mind as much as on the film. He was still thinking about it when he picked up his developed film at Moto-Photo that afternoon.
``You have some photos here that would blow everyone else away,'' the clerk told him. ``Do you mind if I show some people?''
Lester left five or six prints with the clerk and took the rest home - including the shot of the firefighter and baby.
``I don't want anyone else to see this photo,'' Lester told his wife, Betty. In it he saw only suffering. He could not look deeper and see the tenderness.
The next morning, he picked up the newspaper and saw what looked like his photo on page one. But it was sharper than his. He hadn't even realized another photographer had been there.
Hours later, the Moto-Photo clerk called and said Newsweek wanted to see his negatives.
Newsweek? Until now, the only publication that cared about Lester's photos was the company newsletter, ``The Gasette.'
Starstruck, he sent them. All of them.
A few days later, the Monday that Baylee was buried, Lester's photo appeared on the cover of Newsweek.
``I was probably talked into it,'' he says now. He won't say what he was paid, but it was a lot more than the $20 or $40 he had won from the Ponca City Art Association photo contest for his picture of robins nesting in a pipeline.
Once the magazine hit the stands, the thin 57-year-old with the weathered face and military bearing became an instant celebrity. Co-workers seeking autographs crowded into his office with copies of the magazine.
Laid out before him was his single greatest achievement, but Lester could barely look at it. He was at once proud and ashamed. He signed every magazine cover in the lower right-hand corner, while covering the rest with his left hand.
For a while, he worried his picture might be upsetting the baby's mother. But a couple of weeks after the bombing, he saw Aren on the evening news saying she was proud her daughter had come to symbolize the innocence of the victims.
Permission granted, Lester thought to himself. He started making deals.
A photo distribution company wanted to market the picture to other publications. Why not? A company wanted to sell 18-inch statues of the image. Done. His wife suggested T-shirts, with some of the profit going toward a downtown statue of the image. Sure.
The T-shirts had been in the store only a few days when the shop owner called. The baby's mother is here, he said, and she's livid.
Lester had been trying for weeks to reach her. He wanted to offer to pay for Baylee's funeral, or at least the headstone, but couldn't find out where Aren was staying.
He hung up, jumped in his van and raced to the store. When he got there, Aren was gone. When Lester finally saw her, it was on TV. She was complaining bitterly about Lester making money off her tragedy.
Gas company executives thought the controversy was bad for public relations, and they let Lester know it. What kind of unethical, immoral profiteer was he?
Lester was shocked. He had done a good job for this company for 32 years and now they were making him out to be a crook.
At 10 a.m. on Sept. 6, the boss dropped a document on Lester's desk and gave him a choice. Sign over the photo rights to the company, which would give all the money to charity, or get fired.
It's not my fault
``How much do you want for these?'' the Oklahoma City bureau chief of The Associated Press asked Charles Porter IV.
It was less than three hours after the bombing, and the 25-year-old credit specialist had just picked up his photos from Wal-Mart. He hadn't realized what he had until the clerk at the photo counter shuffled through them, stopped at one picture and began to cry.
The AP bureau chief had stopped at the same one, recognizing its compelling news value. And that's when he brought up money.
No one had ever offered to pay Charles for his pictures before. Sure, he was pretty proud of some of the photos he had taken of the Bullnanza Rodeo at the Lazy E Arena, but that was just for fun.
Hours after the photo moved across the AP circuits, magazines, foreign publications and photo-marketing companies were calling asking for rights. The baby-faced young man with the round, wire-rimmed glasses and straight, straw-colored hair didn't even know what that meant.
He was so overwhelmed that for a moment, he wished he had never taken that ``stupid photo.''
The next morning, he called two people: His lawyer and his minister.
Charles wasn't making much at the bank. His wife, Sherylynn, a piano teacher, didn't make much either. Their duplex was awfully small. Maybe this photo was their ticket. But finding opportunity in the tragedy of another made him uneasy.
God put you there with a camera for a reason, his pastor told him. Perhaps some good will come of this.
Offers flooded in. Precious Moments wanted licensing rights for a figurine. A businessman wanted to make a commemorative coin. Another company proposed a calling card.
``People called thinking I was some hick they could take advantage of,'' Charles says now. He told them to call his lawyer to work out the deals.
Sometimes, he called Aren to get her permission. Sometimes, he didn't.
His face reddens when asked why. It's not his fault, he says. It's the companies. They promised to call Aren and didn't.
When the merchandise made its appearance, Charles started getting calls - angry people haranguing him about ``blood money'' and ``profiteering.'' He never solicited anything, he says now, the veins standing out in his neck. ``I haven't called a soul.''
He didn't ask to be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, either. And he didn't seek the prestigious British Picture Editors Award. They called him, offered an all-expenses paid trip to London with his wife to pick up his prize.
London! Charles had never been farther east than Arkansas.
How did you get an invitation into the Lord Mayor's mansion? the cabbie taking them back to the hotel wondered.
``Oh, my God,'' he said when Charles explained. ``So you're the famous photographer.''
When Charles got back to his bank job, his co-workers were talking behind his back. How much company time was he taking to collect awards and give speeches at a legislators forum in Tulsa, a bankers convention in San Francisco?
Friendship and duty
Capt. Chris Fields cringed when he heard the biting remarks. It was just a couple of guys from another fire station he didn't get along with anyway, but it hurt just the same.
``I did more rescues than he did,'' one fellow firefighter grumbled.
But it was Chris, not him, who got to have breakfast with Tom Brokaw and Barbara Walters, be on a first-name basis with the governor's wife and get free trips to New York and Los Angeles for TV interviews.
Chris was even invited to be grand marshal of a parade in the little town of Washington, N.C., where the Washington Daily News ran the photograph on page one for three weeks as part of a fund-raising campaign for the bombing victims.
Chris had not been aware of anyone taking his picture when he held Baylee in his arms. He first found out about it that night when a London newspaper called the fire department for help in identifying the firefighter in the picture.
Chris' first thought, when he saw the photograph on the front page of his newspaper the next morning, was for the baby's family. I hope, he said to himself, that they didn't learn this way that their baby was dead.
The caption in the paper identified him only as an Oklahoma City firefighter, but reporters from around the world tracked him down that morning, calling for interviews and knocking on the station house door.
Chris had heard of firefighters who started believing their publicity. They were called heroes, supermen, for a little while. And then the attention would go away. Chris knew the story of one fireman who had rescued a baby trapped in a Texas well and committed suicide years later when the publicity faded.
He was determined from the start that the publicity would not change him. No way. He was a good firefighter, husband and father and nothing was going to change that.
He couldn't think of himself as a hero either. How could he? Other firefighters had saved lives in the rubble of the federal building. Every victim Chris touched that day was already dead.
Chris, 31, was an extrovert, the station house clown, so the media spotlight didn't unnerve him. What terrified him was the prospect of meeting the baby's mother. Would she want him to tell her details about her baby's death? Would she just want to talk? How would he handle her tears?
As the last person to hold Baylee, Chris knew how important he was to the baby's mother. He considered it his duty to comfort and protect her.
When she was vilified on the TV news by resentful bombing victims, he defended her. When she wanted to stop the merchandising of the photo, he recommended a lawyer.
Through the weeks and months of phone calls and visits, duty turned to friendship. At first, he just held her while she cried. Later, they didn't even talk about the bombing anymore. They just talked about everyday things - his son's gymnastics lessons, her new wallpaper.
They also did a lot of interviews together. The press seemed to like them side by side.
A request from a British tabloid seemed no different until the reporter started getting personal. How often did they talk on the phone? Did Chris go to her house often? What did Chris's wife think about the time they were spending together?
Their fears were confirmed when the photographer asked them to kiss. They refused. But it was too late. Soon, tabloid reporters and photographers were at Chris' house, asking his wife, Sherry, to pose alone.
Four endings
Fate brought Charles, Lester, Chris and Aren together. But once the picture was taken, each of them chose a different path.
Charles Porter is still working at the bank, but he's not content there anymore. He longs to be a full-time photographer. He's getting paid for taking pictures of the Bullnanza Rodeo now, but he's still waiting for an offer from some big news organization.
What are his credentials? ``I only have one,'' he says.
Lester LaRue refused to sign the rights to his photo over to the gas company. ``It's my picture,'' he figured, ``and I should decide what to do with it.''
So his bosses confiscated his company credit card and car keys and showed him the door. Thirty-two years of loyal service had come to nothing but a silent drive home with a co-worker. All the way home, Lester's head was filled with a numbing roar.
Lester is suing the company for wrongful termination. While waiting for the case to come to trial, he spends his days making cabinets in his garage.
Chris Fields got the police to run the British reporters off his front lawn. He and Aren are still friends. When she telephones and Chris isn't home, his wife takes the messages and reminds him to call her back.
Chris is still giving interviews, but figures his celebrity will soon pass.
``If it doesn't,'' he says, ``I'll just keep representing the Oklahoma City Fire Department.''
Aren plunged into a deep depression over the holidays. Two days after the new year, she couldn't stop crying. She gulped her medication, but it didn't stop her from sobbing through her manicure in the morning and at her parents' barber shop in the afternoon. That night, she cried herself to sleep.
When she awoke the next morning, her face stained by tears, she gathered up the white plastic bottles cluttering her nightstand and threw them away.
She has hired a lawyer to try to gain some control over the merchandising of the photo and preserve the dignity of Baylee's memory. She plans to keep vigil at the bombing trial in Denver.
Aren wants to have another baby and has asked several doctors about artificial insemination. They have told her she's not ready.
``I'm trying to replace some of the love I have for her,'' she says, ``I miss being a mom.''
Someday, she says, she will be strong enough to put away her daughter's toys and take down the giant painting done from the photograph of Chris and Baylee.
But not yet.
LENGTH: Long : 371 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. 1. Aren Almon, mother of the baby in the photo takenby CNBat the Oklahoma City explosion, and firefighter Chris Fields (top
photo) have become friends. 2. Two amateur photographers took almost
identical photos of Fields and the baby. 3. Charles Porter IV (with
newspaper) sold his photo to The Associated Press, 4. while Lester
``Bob'' LaRue (right) sold his photo to Newsweek. color.