Friends, family, pay respects to AP photographer Paul Vathis

Photo of Paul Vathis

Paul Vathis Obituary (Dec. 10)

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Friends, family and colleagues of Paul Vathis paid last respects Friday to the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer who worked for The Associated Press for 56 years and died Dec. 10, 2002.

Vathis was still working for the news cooperative when he died in his sleep Tuesday at his Mechanicsbug home at 77.

About 150 mourners attended his funeral at the Cathedral Church of St. Stephen, a 176-year-old Episopal church that overlooks the Susquehanna River in Harrisburg. Six of Vathis' colleagues — four AP photographers from Philadelphia and two from Pittsburgh — served as the pallbearers.

"His life was long and it was full," said the Very Rev. Malcolm H. McDowell Jr., dean of the church, who officiated. "We have been in the presence of someone who helped us glimpse God."

Vathis, who had been assigned to the AP's Harrisburg bureau since 1952, won his Pulitzer in 1962 for capturing the image of President Kennedy and former President Eisenhower walking together at Camp David, their backs toward the camera, after the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba.

His vast portfolio included pictures from Wilt Chamberlain's history-making 100-point basketball game in 1962, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979, the news-conference suicide of Pennsylvania state Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer in 1987, and decades of covering of Pennsylvania politics and government, as well as the Little League World Series in Williamsport.

A Marine combat veteran of World War II who is survived by his wife, Barbara, and their three grown children, Vathis received a military burial at Indiantown Gap National Cemetery in Annville, about 15 miles northeast of Harrisburg.