Family, football and photography

SNAP-HAPPY: Including his three years as a cadet, Paul Rickard has, over a total of more than 36 years, and counting, snapped tens of thousands of photographs for The Gisborne Herald, capturing events from sports games and wedding anniversaries, to the 2002 grounding of log ship the Jody F Millennium and 2007’s catastrophic earthquake. Picture by Rebecca Grunwell

In the lead-up to the charity golf tournament he’s worked on for nearly 20 years, The Gisborne Herald chief photographer Paul Rickard reflects on more than 50 years of photography, sport, and the ‘widowmaker’ that could have ended it all.

When Paul “Rick” Rickard suffered a heart attack in the early hours of June 8 last year he was in the waiting room of Gisborne Hospital’s emergency department, metres from the people and equipment that saved his life. But he could have been anywhere.

“Just the day before I’d been at a bull sale at Whāngārā in the morning, then at Ngātapa in the afternoon,” says Rick, whose work as chief photographer for The Gisborne Herald takes him to some pretty remote spots.

“They said the event I had is known as the ‘widowmaker’ due to the low rate of survival, so if it had happened while I was out and about – even just driving along – things could have been a lot different.”

What he does know is that if he got into trouble while in the region’s more remote areas, there’s a good chance the Trust Tairāwhiti Eastland Rescue Helicopter would have flown to his aid.

“I’d often seen it in action when working in places like right up the East Coast . . . it’s an amazing service,” he says. “Raising money to support it is a great cause, which is why I get so involved.”

Rick’s involvement is in the Eastland Helicopter Rescue Trust Charity Golf Tournament held annually at Poverty Bay Golf Club, which donates the day’s green fees to the cause.

As a long-time member of the club, he plays key roles from pulling together teams to tallying scores at the end of the day.

Since year dot he’s played in the tournament, too, having formed Thistle Boys with mates (and fellow former Thistle Football Club players) Lee Pollitt, Dudley Meadows and John Van Helden.

And at this year’s 18th annual event — to be held on March 15 — Rick will be back, in both his organising and playing roles.

“I’ve had to make a few changes, like not hiking up hills carrying a whole lot of camera gear,” he says. “But I’ve been incredibly lucky to have had all those experiences, even more so to be able to keep on doing it all.”

One of Jean and Hugh Rickard’s seven children, Paul Gerard Rickard should have been born in Taupō — like his two older brothers — but with a birthweight of 10 pounds 12 ounces (4.59 kilograms), his mum had to be taken to Hamilton where, on December 31, 1954, he was born by caesarean section.

When he was seven the family moved back to his parents’ home town of Gisborne, settling in the Lytton Road home where the kids spent their childhoods.

“It was just a little roughcast place on three-quarters of an acre (3035 square metres) but Dad, a builder, just kept adding to it as the family grew,” he says.

“It was a fantastic place to grow up. The Taruheru River was just a couple of hundred metres away and Dad would make plywood kayaks and paint them up for us. We’d carry them down to the river and be off, sometimes for days at a time, exploring or camping up by the Waimatā River.

“To go to Te Hapara School we’d just jump over the fence. Gisborne Intermediate was pretty handy, too and as we got older, Lytton High School was just a few minutes up the road.”

All the while, there was sport, Rick starting with rugby before moving on to hockey, then his great love, football.

“Te Hapara School didn’t have a team but my best mate John Whitley’s dad, Ian, was involved in the game, so in 1965 he set up and coached a team, and that first year we won our age-group competition.

“I just loved it so went on playing, making the regional reps from the age of 12 and going on to join Gisborne Thistle AFC, which I stayed with all my playing life.”

That playing life lasted for decades, Rick’s towering presence at centre-half thwarting many an opposition player in the nearly 20 years (six as captain) he took the field for Thistle’s first team.

He was also starting a new career, having joined The Gisborne Herald as a cadet photographer in 1972, fresh out of school.

“I’d worked as a paper boy for seven years then one day I was working with Johnny at his dad’s business (Gosford Fish Shop) when we saw the ad for a cadet in the newspaper, and I applied,” he says.

“I didn’t know a thing about cameras but Peaky (former chief photographer Alan Peake) said I was the only kid who was honest about that so he felt confident he could train me.”

As it turned out Peaky was right . . . Rick took to the work straight away, learning not just how to shoot a good image but also how to manage tricky situations, how to care for his gear (including the Pentax SLA paid for from his own pocket) and how to develop the black-and-white photos used at the time.

And he learned more than that. Alan Peake – with whom Rick remained fast friends until Alan died in 2011 – introduced his young protege to local watering holes like the Albion, Masonic and Royal hotels, often ending the night chewing the fat at the home Alan shared with his wife, Pearl.

“Bev Davy was also on the team, then there was Tom Doddrell, a bit of a legend who’d been a photographer all his life but was at that time running the Klischograph used to make the photos into plates.”

After completing his three-year cadetship, the young Rick had itchy feet and in 1976 headed over the Tasman where he lived in Melbourne, Brisbane and finally the tropical city of Townsville, where he worked in the chiller at the local freezing works.

“The climate is so hot in Townsville that suited me fine, and because I was flatting with some guys I met at a boarding house we all had a lot of fun,” he says.

“It was that typical Aussie lifestyle of wearing shorts and t-shirts all year round, sinking a lot of XXXX (beer) and playing snooker, darts and cricket for our local, the Tattersalls Hotel.”

At the end of 1979 Rick headed back to Gisborne to see family and to celebrate his 25th birthday.

“(Gisborne Herald managing director) Michael Muir heard I was back and called to see if I wanted a job,” says Rick.

“There was no opening in photography, but there was one in advertising so I jumped on board. But the moment he heard I was back Peaky ran downstairs with a camera and said ‘right, you’re doing all the ad and feature photography, and you can help us out if we’re short’. So it was kind of a bit of both.”

Of course, Rick also jumped straight back into football, rejoining Thistle’s first team, with which he played for another decade.

“It was a huge time for football in Gisborne and we travelled away every other weekend playing Central League games from Palmerston North, New Plymouth and Whanganui to Hawke’s Bay, Levin and Wellington leaving Gisborne at 4pm on a Friday, playing the next day and heading home that same night.

“We had some great times and I was in some very good sides but by the end I’d played over 200 games – 101 of them being Central League games played in the last five years without missing one – and that was enough.”

That commitment meant that, when asked in the early 1980s, Rick could not rejoin the Herald photography department . . . weekend shifts and weekend sports don’t mix.

So he continued his work in advertising while photographers Mike Spence, then Gray Clapham and then Glen Thornber worked with Alan.

In the mid-1980s, Dave Thomas abandoned his work on the press to become a photographer and soon after, when Alan retired, it was just him and Glen.

By the time Glen left town in 1991 Rick had retired from playing football and was able to join Dave in the photography department, the pair going on to work together for the next 22 years.

“Sometimes we worked in tandem, sometimes by ourselves, and sometimes with one of the younger photographers we had over the years – Brett Mead, Susan Maclaurin, Rebecca Grunwell (currently on maternity leave) and Liam Clayton (still on staff).”

It was Brett who was on the team at 8.55pm on December 20, 2007 when Gisborne was struck by the magnitude 6.7 earthquake that shook the town apart.

“The staff had been having Christmas drinks downstairs and about six of us were finishing the clean-up with plans to head over to the Irish Rover to finish the night,” Rick says.

“Everything started to tremble then the concrete floor was heaving so we all raced outside, realising once it stopped that ‘hell, that was a big one’.”

Rick and Brett ran upstairs in the darkness to grab their cameras then bolted out the front door into the street, where the first thing they saw was the verandah of the old Hallenstein’s building swinging to the ground.

“Because we were right in the middle of town we could see straight away what had been demolished, picking our way over piles of bricks to get photographs before the CBD was closed off,” says Paul.

“When we got back to work the power was back on and reporter (now chief sub) Chris Taewa and chief reporter John Jones were working, so by midnight we’d downloaded our shots and headed home ready to be back by 6am the next morning.”

As a newspaper photographer Rick has been witness to many of the happenings – big and small – in the region and was frequently on the sidelines of all manner of events combining his two great passions . . . photography and sport.

While he continues to work up to six days a week, he has also devoted countless hours to supporting the sports he loves, his work in various roles earning him titles from life member of the Tairāwhiti branch of Central Football League to life member (and patron) of Thistle Football Club.

Then, of course, there’s his wrangling of more informal sports “clubs”, like Friday Flash — the crew that plays golf every Friday afternoon — and the weekend version, the Sunday School.

“My (late) mother once told me that, as a kid, if we were going on a family picnic I’d always oversee the packing of the car and run around to make sure we hadn’t forgotten anything,” says Rick, himself a father-of-one. “I guess I’m just a natural organiser.”

Even when he wasn’t supposed to work or play golf after his heart attack, Rick would trundle around the greens and now, with some limitations, he’s back in the swing of things, powered by the cardiac stent and ICD (implantable cardioverter defibrillator) installed after his heart attack, as well as the new knee and hip he got in the years prior.

But the combined effects of that knee, that hip and that dicky heart saw his handicap rise into the 20s (he was on a 7 in his heyday). He’s currently on a 16 and working on reducing it further as his heart gets above its current efficiency of just 30 percent.

To that end, he’ll get plenty of practice in May when he joins mates on a journey to the Gold Coast where they’ll play five courses over eight days.

“I just feel so lucky and can’t speak highly enough of the people at Gisborne Hospital . . . I’ve had to go back a couple of times and they’ve just been amazing.”

Making sure others get access to critical care has reinforced his commitment to the EHRT tournament.

This year, however, he’ll be trundling around on the 45-year-old, petrol-powered golf cart inherited from his father.

“In fact, that’s how it all started,” he says.

“Back in the day the trust asked if they could use the cart to take food and drink around the course for this little event. Now it’s a big thing with up to 36 teams all playing at once, ‘golfing for good’.”