One to One with Bill Goodman:
Bill Luster
aired March 30 and April 1, 2007
Bill Luster’s 38-year career as a newspaper photographer has put him in the presence of presidents, common folk, and everyone in between. He remembers some of those people and shows some of his most memorable work on this edition of One to One with host Bill Goodman.
“What I’m looking for is serendipity,” says the Pulitzer Prize-winning Courier-Journal photographer. “I’m looking for the surprise. Some days you just fall right into it, and some days you don’t. That’s what I live for, frankly—that photographic surprise.”
Luster began his career as a 14-year-old correspondent covering the Little League fields in his native Glasgow, discovering along the way that he enjoyed taking pictures more than writing copy. After attending Western Kentucky University to study journalism, he was hired by the Glasgow Daily Times, where he worked until leaving for Louisville and the Courier.
Through the years, Luster’s talent has drawn the attention of larger papers, but he was reluctant to leave Kentucky. Even National Geographic, where he worked for one year, couldn’t lure him permanently away from home and hearth.
In the interview, Goodman asks Luster to give the story behind some of the incredible photos he’s taken—including Gerald Ford on Air Force One, Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office, Martha Layne Collins viewing the Kentucky Capitol from the air on her last day in office—as well as smaller, personally meaningful portraits such as a family snapping beans in the front yard or children of poverty on the front porch of their home.
