--Life’s ex-managing editor, George Hunt

Ralph Morse cannot remember when he did not want to be a photographer. He devoured all photography courses offered at City College in New York. He obtained his first job in the photo field by taking the Yellow Pages of the New York phone book, starting at A. He was hired at P. By 1938, when he was 21, he was working on assignments for LIFE Magazine. He joined the photographic staff in 1942. As a combat photographer, Morse covered the initial landing on Guadalcanal and General Doolittle’s Tokyo raid. He was aboard the heavy cruiser Vincennes when it was sunk during the battle of Savo Island; he floated for six and a half hours until help came.

Morse’s name in photography is synonymous with solving technical photographic problems. A great technical experimenter, he claims to specialize in nothing – “only pictures.” His thirty years on LIFE Magazine covered every type of assignment from science to theatre, and he was the senior staff photographer at its demise.

He has been a successful improviser and master of multiple exposures. Said former LIFE managing editor George Hunt: “If equipment he needed didn’t exist he built it.”

Encyclopedias and history books abound with his coverage of World War II, the marines at Guadalcanal, the Doolittle Raid in Tokyo, Patton’s drive across France, and was the only civilian photographer covering for the entire world the surrender of the German armies to General Eisenhower. Assigned to the Space Program, he spent 15 years using inventive photography to explain the astronauts and the space flights to LIFE’s readers.

Morse began covering the space program in 1958. By 1962, his technical expertise was so well known around Cape Canaveral that he was one of the first two journalists allowed in a capsule for a 12-hour simulated moon flight. With the cooperation of NASA, he has mounted cameras on rocket tails, gantries, umbilical towers and splash shields. Some of his cameras have had unplanned launchings, others have been smashed or incinerated, but he maintains that the potential shots were worth the risk.

For his coverage of the various astronaut programs, Morse made it his business to get to know well all the pilots, their wives and their children. He fished, sailed and water-skied with his subjects and developed a genuine closeness to them. He all but became a member of this select group of pilots, and their jokes about his persistence and his enthusiasm were expressions of their real admiration for him.

If you ask the fast-talking, alert and energetic Morse which assignment he has found most interesting, he says, “I guess you might say I get most excited about whatever job I’m working on.” He is currently a contract photographer for TIME Magazine.