by Steven Higgs | Dec 28, 2025
From Newspapers to Books to Photo Seminars to Safari Adventures
Bill Thomas was already an accomplished writer, photographer, and author when he burst through the Hazel’s Camera door and into my imagination in the summer of 1979.
As I would five years later, Bill began his career in newspapers, reporting for the Park City Daily News in Bowling Green, while earning a bachelor’s degree in English at Western Kentucky University. Before joining the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1962, he wrote for United Press International and served two years as an analyst in the United States Intelligence Corps at Fort Holobird, Md., a few miles southeast of Baltimore.
On his way up the newsroom ladder to Travel Editor, Bill worked at the Enquirer first as a reporter and then as a traveling feature writer, where he often wrote in his car, with his typewriter in his lap. As he told Indianapolis Monthly in 1982: “It was a pretty good job. They never knew where I was. Sometimes I didn’t know where I was!”
Bill left daily journalism to pursue a freelance career in 1966, after the Enquirer’s infamous “bloodletting,” through which some 20 reporters and editors were let go by the paper’s new owners, The Evening Star Newspaper Co., a subsidiary of the Washington Post.
The day he asked if I would keep workshop fliers on the Hazel’s countertop, Bill had already published eight books – two coffee tables, five travel guides, and a guide to kites. When we spoke in late 1986 for the Call of the Wild newspaper story, he had put book writing on hold.
“Maybe I’m entering a new phase here,” he told me.
By “new phase,” Bill meant the Touch of Success Photo Seminars he started with my group in 1979 had replaced book writing as his primary professional focus, with other sidepaths developing.
“I’ve always had a book in the works,” he told me. “Since 1972, this is the first time I have not had a book in the typewriter or in the research phase.”
Bill’s hiatus from book writing in 1986 was nothing more than that, a temporary pause. He had three in the production pipeline and would publish another five, the last one three years before he died in 2009.
About half were travel books, focusing on destinations that ranged from popular trips and trails, to off-the-beaten-paths, to lakeside recreation areas, to restored and futuristic attractions. Internet sites describe the latter as “a travel guide for dreamers and time travelers” that includes historic restorations, re-created pioneer villages, and futuristic attractions.
Some of the travel books were co-written with wife Phyllis, including a series of four on urban nature: Natural Washington, 1980; Natural New York, 1983; Natural Chicago, 1986; and Natural Los Angeles, 1989. While they were commercial successes and could have been replicated in San Francisco and other metro areas, the couple grew tired of them.
“We sort of got burned out on it,” Bill said. “Perhaps I got more burned out on it than Phyllis did, just from the standpoint that one day I realized that I was spending most of my life in big cities working on those books. And it was more than I wanted to give.”
The first two coffee table books, The Swamp and American Rivers: A Natural History, have permanent homes on my coffee table, alongside Eliot Porter’s In Wildness is the Preservation of the World, the 1962 classic that is considered the genre’s first. In a 1993 letter, he told me Wild Woodlands: The Old-Growth Forests of America – as far from big cities as possible – was in its second printing and had been named the 1992 Coffee Table Book of the Year, though he didn’t say by whom.
Bill wasn’t excited about having his name on his 1986 book How You Can Make $50,000 a Year as a Nature Photojournalist. Of the title: “Couldn’t be more crass.”
What had become the Touch of Success phase of Bill’s career in 1986 had its roots a letter he wrote to us inaugural workshop participants in 1979, in which he promised the $55, two-day course would help us “develop a greater awareness of nature and an eye for seeing picture possibilities around you.”
When a dozen or so aspiring nature photogs arrived that sunny October morning, he had his two coffee table books –The Swamp, 1976, and American Rivers: A Natural History, 1978 – displayed along with copies of his National Geographic and other freelance work. Over a day and a half, he talked about the freelance photography business and his experiences. And we all hiked, canoed, and shot photographs on the property, every expression and shutter click accompanied by what Indianapolis Monthly described as Bill’s “soft, bluegrass drawl.”
Inside, we ate and talked in the room where Bill wrote his articles and books – on the ground floor of the acutely angled structure, via a well-worn path in the rug behind his desk where he mentally composed his prose before committing it to paper on a manual typewriter. No Undo commands in 1979. Only whiteout.
When we sat down in December 1986, I was less than two years into a 22-year newspaper career as an environmental/nature writer and photographer, and the workshop side of his leger had grown and evolved.
“We’re doing 13 of them a year now,” he said. “And that’s what we’ll be doing next year too.”
He was planning a safari to the Serengeti Migration – “thousands and thousands of animals coming across the Serengeti” – and canceling an annual workshop in Arizona in favor of one to photograph the Polar Bear Migration on Hudson Bay.
As part of his new career phase, Bill told me he was looking to my promised land: the Upper Amazon River.
“I’ve looked at the headwaters of the Amazon,” he said. “But you gotta spend time there. … It’s so big; it’s vast.”
Photograph by Steven Higgs, 2024
