News-Herald File Photo. Bob Bilderback is shown here in Feb. 11, 1996, when the former Lake Havasu City Herald photographer was teaching fly-fishing and fly-tying at Mohave Community College.

Pioneer, photographer Bob Bilderback dies at 71


By DIANA PARKER
Tuesday, March 25, 2008 9:11 PM MST


The man who chronicled much of the early history of Lake Havasu City with his camera died earlier this month in Mesa.

Bob Bilderback was the staff photographer at the Lake Havasu City Herald from the summer of 1968 to May 1973, when a dispute over some of his most acclaimed photographs resulted in his firing.

Bilderback, 71, died March 7 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. The effects of ALS forced his move to Mesa in 2004 to be closer to his daughter, Linda Bilderback Ebersole.

"He loved Lake Havasu. He never got over the fact that I had to move him from there," Ebersole said.

Bilderback came to Lake Havasu with his father as a child to fish in the area of Site Six before the city was founded, Ebersole said.

"They'd fight off the rattlesnakes, and they'd fish," she said.

Bilderback moved to Lake Havasu City in the mid-1960s after leaving a stressful job as a photographer and laboratory technician with the aerospace contractor North American Rockwell.

As staff photographer for the Herald, Bilderback documented the myriad community happenings that attended the growth of the new city. He photographed dignitaries, celebrities and girls in bikinis.

The turning point of his career with the Herald came on May 13, 1973, when Bilderback was standing near third base at the baseball field at Lake Havasu High School shooting a game between the amateur Lake Havasu City Pioneers and the Blythe team.

Nineteen-year-old pitcher John Wade, who had been a star athlete at LHHS, was on the mound, and the Pioneers were in their defensive positions when lightning struck the field.

Bilderback recounted in the May 17, 1973 issue of the Herald: "I thought, as did others in the stands, that we had been bombed. I shot pictures desperately. The entire team seemed to have been wiped out, players lying everywhere."

Wade appeared to have been killed instantly. Seven other players were treated at the community hospital. The only thing that seemed to have saved Bilderback was the fact he was wearing rubber soled shoes rather than metal baseball cleats.

"I remember the day he came home when it happened," Ebersole said. "He came home white as a sheet, and I said, something's wrong. And that's when he told me what he'd seen."

Bilderback's stepson Keith Snyder vividly recalled the stories Bilderback later told about the day.

"It scared the living heck out of him, because he thought he was killed," Snyder said. "All he could do was keep his finger on the shutter while the whole team was being wiped out."

Bilderback took some dramatic photographs that day. His editor at the Herald chose not to publish the most graphic of them. Because Bilderback shot the photos on his day off, he felt he was free to sell them to United Press International, which distributed them on their international newswire. A six-page spread of the photos appeared in the German edition of Sports Illustrated.

Unhappy Bilderback had sold the photos, the Herald publisher fired him. Ironically Bilderback was later nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for the shots.

After leaving the Herald, Bilderback was hired to be the official photographer to chronicle the dismantling and reassembly of the London Bridge. He also ran his own photography business, Bilderback Photography, and taught fly fishing and fly tying at Mohave Community College.

Bilderback's last job in Lake Havasu City was as a greeter at Wal-Mart, Ebersole said. Even as his health deteriorated, she said, her father remained positive.

"He never once said, 'Why me?' He kept his spirits up the whole time," she said.

You may contact the reporter at dparker@havasunews.com.