A Tribune photographer for 25 years, Don Casper was the first member of the news media at the fatal Mickelberry Food Products plant explosion on the South Side in February 1968, which left nine people dead and scores injured.
“It was a battle scene,” Casper recounted in a Tribune article that accompanied coverage of the fire. “Like those pictures that have been coming out of Saigon. There were bodies everywhere — dead and injured — you couldn’t tell the difference.”
Casper, 83, died of complications from a stroke on March 31 at his home, said Marie, his wife of 61 years. A Palos Park resident for 28 years, and a Chicago resident before that, Casper also had been battling Crohn’s disease and acute myeloid leukemia, his wife said.
Born and raised on the South Side, Casper graduated in 1954 from Tilden Technical High School, where he distinguished himself as a painter and also worked on the school newspaper. He studied photography at the Illinois Institute of Technology for several years.
Casper began his career as an electrician, working for a time with the now-defunct Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. Casper was a photographer for the Chicago Park District, and he also worked as a freelance photographer for the Southtown Economist newspaper and then for the Chicago Sun-Times. He also shot the occasional freelance news photographs for the Tribune as well.
“He had to support three sons and a wife, so he was on the go all the time,” his wife recalled. “He had a police and a fire radio in the car all the time.”
The Tribune hired Casper as a staff photographer in 1967. In February 1968, he was home with his family on his day off when he heard calls on a fire department radio in a bedroom for police and firefighters at the Mickelberry Food Products sausage-making plant at 49th Place and Halsted Street on the South Side, less than a mile from his home. The fire and explosion at the plant, which was caused by leaking gas from an oil truck, ultimately claimed the lives of nine people and injured more than 70 others.
Casper started for the plant in his car, radioed the Tribune’s chief photographer, Al Madsen, and then left his car to continue on foot. Casper was the first news photographer on the scene, and he shot 50 photos in 30 minutes before leaving for the office.
“I knew it was big,” he recounted to the Tribune after the fire. “I knew I would need help. They were yelling for ambulances. They just don’t yell like that.”
In December 1968, Casper shared the Tribune’s Edward Scott Beck award for outstanding journalistic performance for his coverage of the fire and explosion, and one of his photos was the first full-page spot news photo ever published in the Tribune.
Casper continued to be a mainstay in the Tribune’s photo department, mostly covering spot news.
“When I became a Trib photographer in 1970, I was introduced to Don as ‘Ghost,’ a title he enjoyed,” recalled retired Tribune photographer Chuck Osgood. “The nickname was not for his pallor but his demeanor, as the well-known cartoon character Casper the Friendly Ghost. Don was an excellent photographer and helpful to this novice, new to the world of photojournalism, then simply called news photography. He was a really nice, reliable guy and (a) good shooter.”
Tony Berardi, retired head of the Tribune’s photo department, recalled Casper’s willingness to mainly work evenings.
“He was a very good and reliable photographer with a great sense of humor,” Berardi said.
Retired Tribune reporter and rewrite man Jerry Crimmins called Casper “one of the easiest guys to get along with at the Tribune.”
“He was calm, cool and collected, always helpful to a young reporter,” Crimmins said. “On one of my earliest assignments with him, in 1969 or the early 1970s, Don drove fast on roads that I didn’t even know existed in what was the wild, undeveloped vacant land east of Michigan Avenue and south of the Chicago River, the land that the Lake Shore Drive S-curve went over. It was a crazy, woodsy area east of downtown, and a great shortcut. Don zoomed through there. That’s a photographer. Oh, and he always got the picture. Always.”
Retired Tribune inside lab technician Ollie Borg noted Casper’s “eye for the simple things to make it look dramatic, if you want to call it, to catch the right angle.”
“He enjoyed doing the work, and he was always really reliable,” Borg said. “You never had to worry about him.”
In 1972 and 1974, Casper won first prizes for spot news in the Inland Daily Press Association competition, and in 1973, he captured first prize for news photos in the Chicago Press Photographers contest for a series of pictures of an airplane crash near Midway Airport.
Later in his Tribune career, Casper shot photos for the Tribune’s west suburban bureau. He retired in 1992.
Casper also is survived by three sons, Edward, Robert and Thomas; and two grandchildren.
Services were held.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.