Roy Schiffer Pinney (August 13, 1911 – August 9, 2010) was a professional photographer, herpetologist, writer, journalist, war correspondent and pilot.
Pinney was the former president of the New York Herpetological Society and the author of The Snake Book. He was also an ardent spelunker and the author of Cave Exploration. Roy Pinney worked for the New York Daily News (Brooklyn Section, editor Jack Hoins) for 18 years working as photographer and writer, a familiar figure around New York City arriving on assignments on his 1928 Indian chief motorcycle. He later freelanced for Life, Look, Colliers, and Woman’s Day and other magazines often going on his assignments in his World War II BT-13 plane. He was a founder and trustee of the ASMP. He was the photographer on more than seventy scientific trips. He was the producer of the American TV series “Secrets of Nature” (1955–59) and the cameraman and director of the Wild Cargo series in 1961. He was the oldest surviving of the 500 war correspondents to cover the D-Day invasion of Normandy before his death in 2010. He lived in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, the city of his birth.
Table of Contents
- 1 Biography
- 1.1 The Golden Book of Wild Animal Pets
- 1.2 The Animals in the Bible: The Identity and Natural History of All the Animals Mentioned in the Bible
- 1.3 Vanishing Tribes
- 1.4 The Snake Book
- 1.5 Adventure Under the Earth. An original article from the Wide World Magazine, 1963.
- 1.6 Underwater archaeology;: Treasures beneath the sea
- 1.7 Pets from Wood, Field and Stream
- 1.8 Cave Exploration
- 1.9 Vanishing Wildlife
- 1.10 Quest for the unknown;: Explorers of today
Biography
The son of grocers, Pinney was born and raised upon the Lower East Side. Pinney caught his first venomous snake, a rattler, at age 12 even if attending Boy Scout camp. He was chastised, but it did not take. He attended tall school at DeWitt Clinton High School, an all-boys public bookish at that time upon 10th Avenue and 59th Street in New York City later than classmates and lifelong links Bernard Herrmann and Abraham Polonsky.
In 1928 Pinney researcher to use a camera and was employed by Underwood & Underwood through March 8, 1929.
Pinney bagged exceeding 1,000 venomous serpents whatever over the planet. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals gave him stray snakes in compulsion of homes and he kept the best for himself.
His first adore was photography. Pinney was upset while photographing the Normandy invasion (“just a fragment of shrapnel, nothing serious”), and complex shot pictures of the Yom Kippur War. He sold his behave to Life and Look Magazine once they were the pinnacle. He moved upon to shooting advertising photos, “where the big bucks are,” he explained.
He misrepresented his life’s course through his collaboration subsequent to the flora and fauna writer Ivan T. Sanderson, who brought a swap animal to operate off to Dave Garroway, the chat show host, each week. Pinney was Sanderson’s producer and cameraman. He went on to accomplishment as cameraman for such nature accomplishment gurus as Marlin Perkins and Lorne Greene. Pinney wrote 2,000 articles and beyond 20 books, about everything from tribal cultures to how to survive the atomic bomb. The last was The Snake Book, published in 1981. He made greater than 160 expeditions to distant destinations.
A 1971 divorce left him bitter, so he threw away many of his cameras and stopped taking pictures. He subsequently invested his personal savings in a other television series nearly a 25-year-old zoologist’s adventures, shot 39 episodes and couldn’t sell it. “She in point toward of fact has a special charisma subsequently animals,” he insists to this day.
On August 9, 2010 Pinney died at the age of 98, just four days since his 99th birthday.
Pinney lived in Sanderson’s former apartment, as he had past the divorce, surrounded by artifacts from endangered cultures, an undisclosed number of snakes, and 50,000 aging photographs.
Last update 2021-08-06