Jack E. Boucher - Career Highlights

Career Highlights

Boucher worked 18 hours non-stop photographing a hurricane that ravaged Atlantic City in November 1950, holding his 4x5 large format speed graphic and camera bag over his head in water up to his armpits. While reconnoitering camera vantage points to document Fortress El Morro in Old San Juan in 1967, Puerto Rico. Boucher and his wife Peggy were passengers aboard a sailing catamaran that was struck and cut in two by a submarine entering the San Juan harbor. During the 1990s he produced over 500 large format images of the White House for the Historic American Buildings Survey, some days producing only a single image. A proud possession is a book published by the White House centering on the family living quarters illustrated by his work. His copy was personally autographed to him by the President and the First Lady.

The assignment of which he was most proud was a three week stint photographically documenting the leprosy settlement "Kalaupapa," on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, living among the 85 victims still in residence there at the time. "I vividly remember studying the story of the Belgian Priest Fr. Damien and his labors for 16 years among the lepers while in grade school. I never dreamed I would be able to go there."

Boucher completed the National Trust of England's "Attingham School" in 1969, an intensive summer study program dealing with the historic country houses of England, and architecture from Roman times to the Regency Period. About 1973 he was one of 36 selected to participate in the European Traveling Summer School for Historic Architecture and Preservation. It was a seven week study tour through England, France, Holland and Belgium.

American Preservation Magazine published a series of articles in which he wrote and showed photographs of historic cities in the Soviet Union, Belgium, Hungary and Italy.

He conceived and oversaw the preservation of Atlantic City's 1857 Absecon Lighthouse in 1964; the ca 1820s Weymouth Furnace. Earlier, and at age 21 in 1952, Boucher was the instigator and one of two key people from the preservation/conservation field responsible for the preservation of New Jersey 98,000 acres (400 km2) Wharton Forest, home to three major historic iron furnace villages that served the American Revolution, twenty four species of wild orchids, the habitat of the rare "Pine Barrens Tree Frog," and a canoeing and hunting retreat.

In 1952 he personally guided Mike Hudoba, noted outdoors writer on a several day canoe trip through the Warton Forest rivers. He once spoke of a three week canoe trip to fish for trout in Canadian wilderness a few hundred miles from the Arctic Circle. Navigating the Bersimus River, they were attempting to reach Lake Boucher but were unable to portage around rapids.