Dear Mr. Chapple

A rejection letter from LIFE Magazine, 1983

“Here’s the mail,” chirped the studio receptionist as she handed me three envelopes, “one of them looks interesting.” I thumbed through the letters quickly, scanning the return addresses. Piedmont Bank, probably bank statements or a past due notice I thought, then I saw the LIFE logo, from LIFE magazine. I turned around and bounded up the stairs to my office - 437 South Tryon Street - letters in hand. I just knew that LIFE Magazine would have good news for me, but I didn’t want to open up in front of my team.

Photograph by the author of Francis Rogallo, inventor of the hang glider, at Jockey’s Ridge, North Carolina in 1983 for Sportstyle Magazine.

A month back I submitted slides of a project I shot for Sportstyle Magazine. They sent me to the Outer Banks to photograph Francis Rogallo, the inventor of the hang glider. Francis now lived just a few miles from the birthplace of aviation. He showed me miniature scale models with ping pong balls as the payload, holding them in his hand, zooming around the room. “But Mr. Rogallo,” I asked, “how did you do the first human flight test?” “Oh that was easy,” he replied, “I just strapped one of my kids in and we went out to the beach.” I drove back to Charlotte, on a creative high, thinking about the mad engineer I had just met, the engineer who forever changed the future of unpowered flight. Who else might want to publish these images?

Sitting down in my chair, I arranged a few other things cluttering up my desk and reached for the old style letter opener in my top left drawer. I wiggled the point into the sealed flap and slowly pushed the blade, slicing open the beige colored envelope.

Rejection letter from LIFE Magazine in 1983.

My eyes skimmed the whole letter at once, all four paragraphs. I tried to read from the beginning, but all I saw was “we must pass” and “does not” signed by John Loengard, Picture Editor. Stunned, I now read every word as if the alphabet weighed a hundred pounds. Nope, nothing changed. My images were rejected by LIFE Magazine, personally rejected by the world’s leading Picture Editor and one of journalism’s photography greats.

And then I saw it, on the fourth reading I saw the detail I had missed. Mr. Loengard misspelled a word.