The photographer who in 1963 took the iconic picture of John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father’s casket during the assassinated president’s funeral has lost his battle with cancer. Stan Stearns, 76, died Friday at the Hospice of the Chesapeake’s Mandrin House in Harwood, Md. Mr. Sterns was president of the White House News Photographers Association in 1969.
Stanley Frank Stearns was born May 11, 1935, in Annapolis. He attended Annapolis High School and began working as a photographer at the Capitol newspaper when he was 16. Mr. Stearns spent four years with the Air Force as a photographer for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, before joining U.P.I. in Washington near the end of the Eisenhower administration. He later covered the administrations of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon before moving into commercial photography in the 1970s.
Funeral services are planned for Tuesday in Annapolis.Services will be held at Hardesty Funeral Home on Ridgely Avenue in Annapolis on Tuesday at 9:30 a.m. He will be buried in the Maryland Veteran’s Cemetery in Crownsville.
We will post more information as it becomes available.
Obituaries and tributes can be found in The New York Times and The Washington Post.
