TUESDAY, JULY 28 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE B5
chiefs. Barechested boys stood
and saluted from a wooden foot-
bridge. Some people held their
dogs as they waved goodbye. A
young couple watched from a
motorcycle. Two people, standing
in cinders beside the railroad
track, held a homemade sign:
“So-Long Bobby.”
“Most of us hide most of the
time,” Mr. Fusco later said. “We
don’t want people aware of what
we are feeling. But that day, very
few people were hiding. It was a
consistent wave of emotion with-
out interruption.”
During the Korean War, Mr.
Fusco had been a photographer in
the Army, often taking aerial pho-
tographs. He knew how to focus
his cameras while in a moving
vehicle.
On this day, he was looking out
of the right side of the train,
facing west toward a setting sun.
He focused on people’s faces,
which are clear and sharp even as
buildings and cars in the back-
ground are in a blur.
Lengthening shadows
stretched toward the train, mak-
ing the patches of grass and the
colors of people’s clothing all the
more vivid. Mr. Fusco kept shoot-
ing pictures throughout the en-
tire 200-mile journey, holding his
shutter open for a second or more
as twilight fell.
Because Look magazine came
out every two weeks, the editors
decided Kennedy’s funeral was
old news when it was time to
publish the next edition. Only two
of Mr. Fusco’s photographs ap-
peared in the magazine, both in
black and white.
Mr. Fusco’s photographs from
the RFK funeral train were sent to
the Library of Congress after
Look closed in 1971. He held on to
a few images himself, but for 30years he could not interest any-
one in publishing them.
Several finally appeared in
1998 in George magazine, found-
ed by Kennedy’s nephew, John F.
Kennedy Jr. In 2008, an editor
from the Aperture Foundation,
which advances the art of photog-
raphy, went to the Library of
Congress and discovered Mr. Fus-
co’s trove of photographs, which
included more than 1,800 pris-
tine Kodachrome slides of people
watching the train pass by.
In the years since, Aperture has
published several editions of
“RFK Funeral Train,” the most
recent of which contains morethan 100 images. The San Francis-
co Museum of Modern Art pre-
sented an exhibition of Mr. Fus-
co’s funeral train photos in 2018.
“Fusco’s photographs are
amazing in pretty much every
way,” critic Louis Menand wrote
in the New Yorker. “... Individual
faces are often captured in focus
against a slightly blurred back-
ground. There is a nakedness in
them that is rare in public — these
people don’t think that anyone is
looking at them — a nakedness
that many photographers have
tried to capture. It’s here.”
John Paul Fusco was born Aug.
2, 1930, in Leominster, Mass. Hisfather was a musician, teacher
and machinist, his mother a fac-
tory worker.
Mr. Fusco, who always went by
his middle name, took up photog-
raphy as a hobby in his early teens
and studied in New York before
joining the Army during the Ko-
rean War. He was wounded while
photographing combat opera-
tions and received the Bronze
Star Medal and Purple Heart.
He used the G.I. Bill to attend
Ohio University, one of the few
colleges at the time with a pho-
tography program. Soon after
graduating in 1957, he became a
staff photographer at Look.After the magazine closed, Mr.
Fusco joined the Magnum photo
agency. Among other subjects, he
did in-depth studies of rebel
groups in Mexico and AIDS pa-
tients in San Francisco.
Mr. Fusco lived in Mill Valley,
Calif., for more than 20 years
before moving to a log cabin in
West Milford, N.J., in 1993. After
recovering from lung cancer in
the 1990s, he stopped accepting
outside assignments and focused
exclusively on personal projects.
In Ukraine, he photographed
people dealing with the after-
math of the meltdown of the
Chernobyl nuclear reactor. One of
his last major projects, called
“Bitter Fruit,” chronicled dozens
of funerals of U.S. service mem-
bers killed in the Iraq War, begin-
ning in 2003.
He published several books,
including ones on Chernobyl, mi-
grant farmworkers and “Marina
& Ruby,” about his daughter and
her horse. He returned to Califor-
nia in 2009.
His marriage to Patricia Sayer
ended in divorce. Survivors in-
clude two children, Anthony Fus-
co of San Francisco and Marina
Fusco Nims of Portland, Ore.; and
five grandchildren.
Mr. Fusco did not see most of
the images from the Kennedy
funeral procession until 40 years
after he took them. When he
finally viewed the 1,800 slides, he
could finally recognize what he
had accomplished from the win-
dow of a slowly moving train.
“The occasional blur and mo-
tion,” he said in 2010, “added an
emotional aspect — the disinte-
gration of life, the passage of time.
My whole take on photography is
to answer the question, ‘What are
people feeling at that moment?’ ”
[email protected]BY MATT SCHUDELPaul Fusco, who traveled the
world as a photojournalist but
whose most indelible images,
portraying a nation in mourning,
were captured on a single day in
1968 as he rode aboard Robert F.
Kennedy’s funeral train from
New York to Washington, died
July 15 at an assisted-living facili-
ty in San Anselmo, Calif. He was
89.
He had complications from de-
mentia, said his son, Anthony
Fusco.
During the heart of his career,
Mr. Fusco was a staff photogra-
pher for Look, which in the 1960s
was Life magazine’s chief compet-
itor. Both magazines had circula-
tions of several million each and
were known for their exceptional
photography.
After joining Look in 1957, Mr.
Fusco worked across Europe and
Asia, and from Egypt to Mexico to
Brazil. Drawn particularly to the
downtrodden, he photographed
Kentucky coal miners, homeless
people in New York, migrant
farmworkers in California and
rural poverty in the South.
“I want to take pictures of
people that, when you see them,
you can feel their lives,” he told
the Record newspaper of Bergen
County, N.J., in 2005.
He did not know what to expect
when he was assigned to cover
Kennedy’s funeral in New York on
June 8, 1968, days after the Demo-
cratic senator from New York had
been assassinated in Los Angeles.
After the service at Manhattan’s
St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Kennedy’s
flag-draped casket was to be
placed on a train bound for Wash-
ington. Mr. Fusco’s editor told
him to go to Penn Station.
“He told me, ‘There’s a train,
get on it,’ ’’ Mr. Fusco recalled to
Publishers Weekly in 2008. “No
instructions.”
Mr. Fusco had three cameras —
two Leicas and a Nikon — and a
huge supply of Kodachrome film.
He was not allowed to take pic-
tures inside the train and was
prevented from entering the
train’s last car, which carried Ken-
nedy’s body. He was thinking of
how he would cover the burial at
Arlington National Cemetery.
As the train emerged from a
tunnel under the Hudson River
and entered New Jersey, Mr. Fus-
co saw what would become his
most memorable and poignant
subject: ordinary citizens along-
side the railroad tracks, bearing
witness and sharing grief.
“I was astounded by the peo-
ple,” Mr. Fusco told the Palm
Beach Post in 2010. “I just reflex-
ively jumped up, went to the
window and pulled down the top
pane. And I just stood in that
window for eight hours and shot
film.... I was overwhelmed by
the constant stream of people and
the variety and mixture and visi-
ble pain and loss.”
They stood at attention or in
informal groups. Catholic school
girls were in plaid dresses, next to
nuns in their habits. Children and
entire families lined up, wearing
only their swimsuits on a hot day.
“The train was moving mourn-
ful slow,” one Baltimore resident
would recall, through ragged sub-
urbs and rundown sections of
cities, all of them thronged with
people — more than a million,
Kennedy biographer Evan Thom-
as estimated.
They stood shoulder to shoul-
der, people of all ages and races, a
tableau of America. Women knelt
in prayer and waved handker-
PAUL FUSCO, 89
Photographer captured nation’s shared grief alongside RFK’s funeral train
PHOTOS COPYRIGHT PAUL FUSCO/MAGNUM PHOTOSCOPYRIGHT PAUL FUSCO/MAGNUM PHOTOS
Bystanders, top, salute Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral train in 1968 as it traveled from New
York to Washington. Photographer Paul Fusco, above in 1993, was not allowed to enter the
train’s last car, which carried Kennedy’s body, so he turned his lens outward to the crowds.obituaries
BY IAN LIVINGSTONThe heat this month has kept
coming and coming and now has
tied a record for its persistence. On
Monday, Washington notched its
25th day hitting at least 90 degrees,
tying the record for the most such
days in a month.
On Tuesday, it seems destined to
surpass it.
The 90-degree milestone is just
one of a number of impressive heat
records that have been tested or
smashed in recent weeks.
The 90-degree days have mount-
ed over the course of three heat
waves this month (defined as at
least three consecutive days hitting
90 or higher). This first heat wave,
which began in late June, lasted 20
days, the second-longest on record.
The second heat wave spanned
July 17 to 23, while we began yet
another on Saturday.
The 25 days hitting at least 90
degrees this month matches the
record mark from 2011. In addi-
tion to being the most 90-degree
days in July, it also exceeds the
record count in all Junes and Au-gusts. The number of 90-
degree days during this month
alone exceeds 35 percent of sum-
mers on record.When we tack on the nine 90-de-
gree days in June, there have been
34 such days this year, so far, about
12 more than normal.
The 90-degree count is coasting
toward its annual average with
many weeks of summer remaining.
The average is 36 days using data
from 1981 to 2010, but that will
bump to 40 days next year based on
the numbers from 1991 to 2020.
Temperatures have also been
warm at night, where a record for
duration is in jeopardy.
Monday marked the 31st
straight day with lows at or above
70 degrees in Washington. That’s
the third-longest streak on record,
and it seems we should blow by the
standing record of 35 days in 2016
based on the forecaast.
Our temperatures have most re-
sembled summer conditions in
Houston in recent weeks, accord-
ing to the Southeast Regional Cli-
mate Center.
There was some time spent dis-cussing how the 20-day heat wave
from June 26 to July 15, while very
long, was not all that intense. In
fact, the average temperature dur-
ing that heat wave was the lowest
among Washington’s historically
long events. But after that heat
wave ended, the latest rounds of
heat are changing the narrative.
When Washington hit at least 96
degrees five days in a row to start
last week, the streak tied as the
seventh longest with temperatures
that high.
Both Dulles and Baltimore put
up six days in a row of 95 or higher.
At Dulles, that streak tied for the
second longest on record (since
1963). In Baltimore, it tied for the
sixth longest (since 1872). In Balti-
more, all those days were 96 or
higher, which is tied for the third-
longest such streak.
In the past 10 days, Washington
has picked up six (soon to be seven
or more) days at or above 95 de-
grees. The annual average is 12. Thehigh of the streak, 99 degrees, is
about equivalent to its annual hot-
test. Baltimore reached 100 on two
days.
It’s a near-certainty that this
month will finish among the top
four hottest Julys on record. Third
place seems most likely.
Using National Weather Service
forecast numbers for the rest of the
month, a projection of 83.8 degrees
for the average temperature puts
this July between 2012, which
ranked second hottest, and 2010,
which ranked fourth hottest. July
2011 is the record-holder, with 84.5
degrees.
By month’s end, the four hottest
Julys on record will have occurred
since 2010.
This month should also finish
safely above the hottest August on
record, and no Junes have been
close. In other words, July 2020 will
probably be Washington’s third-
hottest month ever recorded.
[email protected]CAPITAL WEATHER GANG
Washington set to break record for most 90-degree days in July
ALEX BRANDON/POOL/ASSOCIATED PRESS
U.S. Capitol Police help a member of the military honor guard who
collapsed in the heat Monday before the John Lewis f arewell.