I was born March 9, 1953, in what was then a small town north of San Diego, a place called Oceanside.  My mother was a housewife and Mom.  My father owned a business collecting chickens that no longer produced eggs and transporting them to a processing plant in downtown San Diego.  I grew up on a one-acre place about two miles out of town.  We had gardens and lots of chickens.

 My father was not an educated man, but he was very smart.  As long as I can remember, he always preached for me to get an education because I didn’t like hard labor.  So of course after graduating high school I went to work in construction . . . mostly as a laborer!  I set up and tore down the forms that held the cement for home foundations and driveways.  Back-breaking work!  I did that for a couple of summers, long enough to realize that my father was right: I didn’t like to work.  I thought I had better get an education.

 I went back to school the next year at a local junior college.  I enrolled as a general education major; I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life.  I started with industrial arts, like metalworking.  Did not fit me; too much like work.  After the first semester, I took a radio class and a photography class.  I loved both of them!  As a result, I earned top grades in these classes.  The next semester I took more photography and radio classes, plus a basic course in television production.

 I was hooked on TV!  I still did photography, but it took a back seat to television.  I loved the immediacy of the field.  You record on tape and play it back . . . instant feedback!  It fit very well with me in my impatient years, when I had to have it all and have it now.

 Before too long I had the field wired: I knew how it worked and how to make it work for me.  I was tending bar in a nightclub in Carlsbad three nights a week, and going to college four days a week.  A very easy schedule; I loved it.  Then my counselor called one day and told me that I had more than enough credits to go on to a four-year college.  I was so comfortable with my life as it was that six months passed before I finally enrolled at California State University, Northridge.

 After I transferred, it took a few months to get acclimated to the fast-paced environment of Los Angeles.  (I came from a small town, remember.)  But once I met a few of the right people, my life started to transform.

 My first big break came when I secured an internship as a cameraperson and stage manager with what was then one of the biggest cable companies in the United States.  Theta Cable’s territory included the cream of show business households: Santa Monica, Brentwood, West Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Sherman Oaks, Encino, and Studio City.  After working on shows about women and their dogs, or people who’d seen aliens, I finally landed on a real show: The Paul Ryan Show.  Paul Ryan was a standup comic and actor.  Funny and personable, he hosted interviews.  I don’t know how he did it, but top Hollywood stars came to our small studio and gave him some of the best interviews on TV.  And nobody got paid!  All of us worked for free; most of the crew were on internships.  I loved it!  Through this show I met Robin Williams (he had just finished his first year of Mork and Mindy), Christopher Reeve (he had finished Superman, but it had not been released yet), Phyllis Diller, John Ritter, Ben Gazzara, Ursula Andress, Jay Leno, and many more.

Because of the The Paul Ryan Show, I had the confidence to go to the studios and find work.  Even before graduation from Cal State Northridge I had real paying jobs, working in commercials and as cameraperson for sporting events.  For ten years I worked in Hollywood in production.  I was on the startup crew for what was then FNN (Financial News Network), now known as CNBC.  At one point I had my own small company called CHESIRE PRODUCTIONS.  I did small productions, commercials, and infomercials for Johnny Carson, William Shatner, the Second Sole Shoe Company, and others.

In 1985, after six years of marriage, I found myself divorced.  Because it was such a big change in my life, I started to make more changes.  I had never played politics well in Hollywood, and I was getting sick of it all.  Someone I had worked with there—but who had left the game—had taken over a company that published posters.  These were real hot in the ’80s: posters of very expensive exotic cars, with stunning, scantily-clad girls on the hoods.  I was given the title of vice president of sales.

I got to travel around the country selling sex appeal.  What could be more fun?  After a year, a big corporation purchased our company just before they went public (to add sex appeal to their stock offering), but before escrow closed the buyout was canceled.  This left us dangling in the wind.  Since our customers were buying from me anyway, I took over the company for the next two years.

Posters have a short sales life, and one day they were no longer saleable.  I had nothing new to offer, so I dissolved the company and took a sales rep position with a title insurance company.  For the next seven years I busted my buns selling a service… and that service, for the most part was not as important as playing the right politics…I don’t do that well.  The stress almost killed me.

  On my forty-third birthday, I resigned from the worst job I’d had since working in construction as a teenager.  But let me back up a bit . . .

A year before I resigned, I received a settlement from a traffic accident.  I bought a 35mm camera and started to take pictures again for the first time since my television days in Hollywood.  It took me a few months to re-teach myself the rules of photography, but I managed.  Now forward again . . .

When I was a sales rep, I shared an apartment on the coast of Long Beach with a view overlooking the Queen Mary at anchor. One night a storm came in, raging with thunder and lightning.  I was able to capture an image of four lightning bolts over the Queen Mary.  That image established me as Robert deCrevecoeur, Photographer.  Since then, it has sold more than 350 copies.  

Soon after returning to Oceanside, my health took a turn that turned out to be a good thing.  On May 15, 1996, I suffered a heart attack and spent six days in the hospital.  Two months after that I was to have an angioplasty.  During the operation, the cardiologist lacerated my artery.  I had to have open-heart surgery just to repair his mistake!  (While they were in there, they threw in a couple of bypasses.)  That near-death experience made me look at my life and decide to make some changes.  

The first thing was, I wanted to really be a photographer!  Up to this point, I had done everything but really be a photographer.  I also wanted to travel and see some of the world, so I made a commitment.  A commitment to go from the tip of Baja California to the Arctic Circle in Alaska.  And so I did.  

I left Oceanside February 16, 1997, traveled to the tip of Baja, and returned to Oceanside March 13.  I then put everything I had in storage, and left for the Alaskan wilderness.  I traveled for the next eight months, taking photographs everywhere I went: up the inside passage, over the Alaskan Highway, out to the Katmi Bear Reserve, Denali Park, and then I crossed the Arctic Circle on July 21.  The road home was a journey also: down the coast of British Columbia, over to the Canadian Rockies, down the Continental Divide through Glacier National Park, Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, Rocky Mountain Park and into Utah, finishing in Death Valley.  I returned home November 4, 1997.  25,000 miles.  300 rolls of film.  I’d crossed the Continental Divide more than 50 times.  Truly a trip of a lifetime.  

Since my return, I have been selling my images at local art fairs, galleries, and through my Website: www.photoducoeur.com.  I have a business in Oceanside where I do all types of commercial photography.  I have covered the SCORE BAJA 1000 offroad race, and was published in Fourwheel Drive Offroad Magazine. And when time permits, I lecture at schools and give slide presentations at retirement communities.

 But I still don’t know what I will do when I grow up!  

Robert de Crevecoeur

January 22, 2001