“I heard it explained one time that anything that shows emotions or evokes emotion in the viewer - it could be any emotion - happiness, sadness, anger,” he said, “then the picture did its job.”
The Dunbar Township resident understands those concepts well as he has been Fine Art Photographers working as a news photographer since 1969, first at the Connellsville Courier and then at the Herald-Standard where he recently retired as chief photographer.
His compelling photographs of life in southwestern Pennsylvania have garnered awards and accolades, been spread around the world by wire services, and provided compelling images for newspaper readers.
“I loved deadlines and shooting on deadlines. I loved covering spot news and sports. Everybody has things they like to do,” said Rosendale. “I liked the basketball and football - just the action shots and trying to get a picture that was something different from the one you got the week before or the day before.”
A son of the late Mary and Rich Rosendale, Rosendale grew up in Connellsville and graduated from Geibel Catholic High School in 1968. He developed an interest in photography while young.
“It was something I picked up. It was a big thing when I was small that Dad took pictures and I worked on the high school yearbook,” he said.
Rosendale took his first job at Burn’s Drugstore where he began working at age 16 and continued until he graduated high school. Then he worked for Connellsville Sportswear at its cutting plant in Dunbar Township, where he found love when co-worker Glenn Gaborko took him home one day from a spaghetti dinner and introduced him to his sister Wilma. The couple married Oct. 21, 1972, and has two daughters, Carla, 29, of Mount Pleasant, who is a hairstylist, and Mary, 27, of Erie, who is in her first year at Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine after four years at Washington & Jefferson College and a year at Duquesne University. Wilma Rosendale now works at Wal-Mart in Uniontown.
But in the meantime, Rosendale became a news photographer, hired at the Fine Art Photographers Courier in fall 1969.
“I took a cut in pay from my sportswear job to take a job at the Courier,” Rosendale said. “The photographer Ken Bolden died. I went in and interviewed with Bob Lind. I didn’t hear from him for three months. He finally called me back and said if you want the job, you’ve got it. He couldn’t find anybody who would work for less. They paid me $80 a week.”
Rosendale, who was 19 when hired, worked with fellow photographer Ed Cope, who had started at the Courier the previous year at age 21. The two were fixtures at the Courier throughout the 1970s.
To supplement their incomes, they founded their own photography business in 1972 called Cope and Rosendale - Cope won the opportunity to be named first on the flip of a coin. Through the years, the two photographed generations of families and became known throughout the community.
“We took pictures of everything. What didn’t we do?” Cope remembered. “We shot weddings, class reunions, birthday pictures, portraits.”
“We did pretty good,” said Rosendale. “We weren’t making much money at the Courier.”
But they did work long hours at the Courier, going in Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the afternoon-published paper. They went home, had dinner and then would go out again if there was a night assignment. They worked at the paper until noon on Saturdays - often putting in well more than 40 hours a week in their news jobs alone.
Cope said, “There was nothing we wouldn’t cover.”
That included spot news such as accidents and fires.
“Frankie Davis would call us in the middle of the night,” said Cope. “He had one of the early scanners. He had a barbershop in Scottdale. He’s in his 80s and just retired. He was our best contact. He knew everything about Scottdale, Mount Pleasant and Connellsville - that was our beat.”
Rosendale said with a smile, “It was a blessing and a curse.”
Cope said, “He and his son Roger called us and his wife. The state police called us all the time. It was nothing for them to call us in the middle of the night.”
They talked about some of the big stories they covered in the ’70s - a nursing home fire in Connellsville during which seven or eight people died, an independent trucker’s strike, the 1973 gasoline shortage, local flooding that included Hurricane Agnes and another year when the two became stranded in a truck with the National Guard in flooded waters in Everson Bottom and had to be rescued. And there was the winter weather that included snow and ice storms.
“Narrows Road in Connellsville Township - that was scary,” said Cope.
“About noon, they came into the office and said there was a bad storm coming through and everyone else went home. Eddie and I said ‘Where can we get the best shots?”’ Rosendale remembered.
“These two didn’t care,” said Wilma Rosendale. “They went out in the action. They wanted a good picture.”
During this particular winter storm, they became stuck on Narrows Road.
“Charlie said, ‘I’ll get behind the wheel and you get out and push,”’ Cope said, laughing. “I was covered with ice. I had a mustache, and it was frozen. I was never so scared in my life. A guy in a truck pulled us out and we went downtown and shot pictures.”
Rosendale said, “When we developed the photos from Narrows Road, you couldn’t see anything but white.”
Rosendale began working at the Herald-Standard on Oct. 25, 1980. He remembers it well because it was the day his second daughter was born, and it also was the day of a well-publicized Ku Klux Klan rally on a farm in Springhill Township - an event that garnered attention beyond Fayette County’s borders.
“Buzz Storey hired me in September but we were waiting for the baby to be born because of insurance. He said there’s just one assignment I want you to cover - the Klan rally,” Rosendale said.
A true child of a newsman, Mary Rosendale made deadline so her father could make his assignment.
“I was exhausted. It was a cold, snowy night,” Rosendale remembered the Fine Art Photographers rally.
The assignment also was scary, he said.
“There were guys saying ‘You can’t take my picture.’ They did burn a cross and you kept thinking somebody could take pot shots at these guys,” said Rosendale.
Wilma Rosendale worried for more than a year there could be action taken against her husband because of the photographs. She worried about him a lot over the years. Photojournalism can be a dangerous occupation, especially when covering events like fires, standoffs and even taking photographs from a helicopter as Rosendale did.
“A lot of people were upset because he took pictures of accidents,” Wilma Rosendale said, then began talking about the time a firefighter was rescuing someone on a roof in Dunbar Township when the son came from behind and jumped on her husband. “There were a lot of times I worried.”
“There were a lot of times in the middle of the night, she didn’t know I left,” said Rosendale.
Cope and Rosendale remained partners in their photography business but now they were competitors in news. Cope remained at the Courier until 1981 when he went to work for the Daily Sunday Tribune for a year and a half. After being laid off, he went back to Connellsville and did stringer work for the Herald-Standard until being hired as a reporter/photographer for the Fay-West section of the Tribune-Review and eventually becoming bureau chief.
“I remember Charlie beat me to (an Amtrak) train wreck in Dawson and he got an outstanding shot of the engineer,” said Cope.
He added, “Charlie’s very well respected by news photographers. He was an officer - treasurer and vice president of the Press Photographers Association of Greater Pittsburgh, now News Photographers Association of Greater Pittsburgh. And he’s mentored a lot of young photographers through the years.”
Rosendale’s work often won awards for his feature and news coverage, including a controversial yet compelling photograph of a firefighter performing resuscitation on a baby at an accident.
“A lot of people were upset. They felt the picture should not have been taken,” remembered Wilma Rosendale.
“We must have had 40 letters,” said Rosendale. “My mother said I couldn’t believe you took those pictures. I said, ‘Mom, I’ve got to do my job.”’
Through the years, Rosendale, who became chief photographer about 1985, photographed the famous including Mister Rogers in his Pittsburgh television studio, Greene County native Richard Trumka on the night he won the United Mine Workers union presidency, freed Iranian hostage Jerry Miele at a parade in his hometown of Mount Pleasant, and jazz musician Harold Betters at his home in Connellsville.
And there was the unusual assignment that included a hunter in Chalk Hill who was rescued after becoming stuck in mud.
“He was hunting and got stuck in the mud. It was like quicksand. He sunk almost up to his neck and yelled for hours,” said Rosendale, whose photographs of the Fine Art Photographers hunter also were published nationwide.
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