Isadora "Izzy" Bleckman
(1933-2021)
Izzy packed a great deal of visual storytelling into his four decades as a globe-trotting television cameraman .. all but the first few years with CBS.
That odyssey, ending with his 2001 retirement, included behind the viewfinder for Charles Kurault's On the Road for many years, the remarkable series that explored small-town America.
Bleckman seldom spoke publicly about his experiences until a Maryland company, Acorn Productions, informed him that it was coming out with a DVD set containing 70 of the roughtly 500 "Road" features that Bleckman, Kurault and sound man Larry Gianneschi created originally for The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite and then for CBS Sunday Morning.
This photo shows reporter, Charles Kuralt with audio engineer, Larry Gianneschi, Jr.* and cameraman, Isadora "Izzy" Bleckman. They traveled more than a million miles and visited 50 states over 20 years while filming On the Road segments for CBS. The stories focused on ordinary people who were often quite extraordinary!
*Larry Gianneschi, Jr. (1925-2009). He was a globetrotting family man through his long career at CBS News. His Emmy award winning work with Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Charles Kuralt and Dan Rather spanned more than four decades. While his work at CBS News covered presidents, prime ministers, politicans and Popes, as well as the world's leading writers, artists, musicians and the important issues of the day, it was his time traveling "On The Road" with Charles Kuralt reporting the stories of everyday Americans that he cherished most. He left behind a legacy in the motion picture industry that is carried on by the dozens he helped and touched who followed him into the industry that he loved.
Thank you, Gentlemen
The memories flooded back when radio hosts Bob Edwards of Sirius Satellite Radio and Scott Simon of NPR came calling. He reminisced with them over the airwaves from the studios of Buffalo's WBFO, a short hop from the home he and his wife, Mary Roseberry shared with their cat, Apricot, just outside the Village of Akron.
Now everybody wanted to hear about the whirlwind career of Bleckman, a Chicago son of immigrants who had grown accustomed to a calmer lifestyle since moving to Western New York State in 1998.
The story started with a bang! The bang was the fatal shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald on November 24, 1963, two days after Oswald murdered President John F. Kennedy.
Bleckman had just started in TV journalism with the Movietone News film syndicate when he was dispatched to Dallas hours after the assassination.
Toting a spring-wound 16-mm camera he arrived just in time to film the news conference, bizarre by today's law enforcement standards in which Oswald denied shooting JFK.
As the suspect was escorted through the jail basement November 24 on the way to court, Bleckman raced to a vantage point just ahead of the media. Squatting down, he began filming just before Jack Ruby shot Oswald in the abdomen.
Not until he saw Oswald lying on the garage floor did he realize what he had recorded. The rookie cameraman covered the Oswald funeral, Ruby's trial and subsequent funeral.
The work got him noticed at CBS and when Movietone folded in 1966, the network jumped to hire him as its Chicago-based cameraman for The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.
Bleckman was out of work for one day. The offer was based on his reputation for the Ruby shot, but also because people knew if he put a roll of film in his camera, he was going to come back with pictures!
The big assignments began rolling in .. the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago; President Richard M. Nixon's groundbreaking 1972 visit to China; the emotional 1986 Moscow recital by egendary pianist Vladimir Horowitz, who had turned his back on the Russian Empire 60 years earlier to seek his fortune in the West; superstar Rudolf Nureyev's return to the Kirov Ballet years after he, too, defected from his Communist homeland.
Along the way, Bleckman had fallen in love with On the Road which Kurault, a veteran CBS correspondent, launched in 1967. Over the next quarter-century, Kuralt, Bleckman and Gianneschi logged 1 million miles as they traversed highway and byway, documenting the stories of ordinary Americans.
The three men loaded their stuff into an old motorhome and they were "on the road". Bleckman recalls it was unbelievable being a cameraman's dream job that was handed to him!
A few segments stand out in Izzy's memory. The very first one was about a man in northern Colorado who hand-fed deer that wandered into his yard. Another was about folks tubing on the Apple River in Wisconsin; a blacksmith who inspired Bleckman to buy the forge he still used to make fire irons and other metal works; worm grunting, a surefire technique used in Sopchoppy, Florida to lure bait worms from the ground and the Virginia daffodil grower who gave him bulbs for the flowers that blossom in his yard every spring.
For Izzy, life on the road was hard on life at home. His first marriage, producing two daughters, ended in divorce.
Bleckman thought he was hot stuff, but he had grown so much since then; the ego thing had fallen away.
Eventually, Izzy met a lady named Mary Roseberry in 1988, when she was public relations director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and he came to town to film a CBS report on the shaky finances of the nation's symphonies.
Izzy and Roseberry carried on a long-distance romance for a decade before he left Evanston, Illinois to marry and settle down with Professor Roseberry who, at the time, taught journalism and English literaturre at Niagara County Community College.
After the 2001 terrorist attacks, weary of jumping through airport security hoops with his cumbersome gear, the photojournalist Charles Kurault called "an Odysseus traveling through time" called it quits.
I loved every minute of it. What other job gives you a front-row seat to history and takes you places like Moscow and Leningrad? And what great characters you meet."
Isadore "Izzy" Bleckman
Legendary cameraman, Isadore Bleckman worked in television film and video for more than 50 years. When Izzy retired from CBS News in 2002, he continued to work in film. He produced a film on photographer, Milton Rogovin and filmed the last of Buffalo's grain scoopers. He also served as editing consultant on the documentary Luminous Shadows: The Artists of Eastern Cuba. He was also a consultant on Acorn Productions release of the On The Road DVD collection and gave numerous audio-visual presentations in the Buffalo area where he lived with Mary.
CBS News cameraman, Isadore Bleckman packed up his equipment and retired after 36 years with the network. "It's the best job in America that I've just left" said Bleckman when he was 67 years of age. "There has been none better". Izzy spent 12 years "On the Road" with Charles Kuralt and 24 years with "Sunday Morning".
You're really lucky if you get Izzy to work on your piece because he can get the most that's possible to get out of a camera.
Charles Osgood
Heavweights like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather requested Bleckman for their stories. When Bleckman retired he was ready to do "some serious sailing" with his wife on their 40-foot boat and finish a 30-year project, restoring his 1951 Bentley.
In explaining what made Bleckman so special, Charles Osgood quotes pianist, Rudolf Serkin .. You don't play piano with your fingers, you play with your heart and the same is true for the camera.
During Izzy's years in the Buffalo area, Mary and Izzy's daughter, Sheera Bleckman who is an editor began research and filming on a project in 2009 when they first learned that a monument was being created in nearby Lewiston to honor those who actively resisted the violence of slavery along that stretch of the Canadian border.
A piece of history was auctioned off at Kelly's Antiques in Clarence, NY. It was a Bolex motion picture camera that had been stored in a metal carrying case marked CBS News. It is the camera that captured decades of history because the camera belonged to "Izzy" Bleckman. Bleckman remembered the Kennedy assassination like it was yesterday and eventually the camera that captured that drama went to the highest bidder. It sold for $16,000.
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