Biography
The son of grocers, Pinney was born and raised on the Lower East Side. Pinney caught his first venomous snake, a rattler, at age 12 while attending Boy Scout camp. He was chastised, but it did not take. Pinney bagged more than 1,000 poisonous serpents all over the planet. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals gave him stray snakes in need of homes and he kept the best for himself.
His first love was photography. Pinney was wounded while photographing the Normandy invasion ("just a piece of shrapnel, nothing serious"), and later shot pictures of the Yom Kippur War. He sold his work to Life and Look Magazine when they were the pinnacle. He moved on to shooting advertising photos, "where the big bucks are," he explained, but soon became bored.
He changed his life's course through his collaboration with the nature writer Ivan T. Sanderson, who brought a different animal to show off to Dave Garroway, the talk show host, each week. Pinney was Sanderson's producer and cameraman. He went on to work as cameraman for such nature show gurus as Marlin Perkins and Lorne Greene. Pinney wrote 2,000 articles and over 20 books, about everything from tribal cultures to how to survive the atomic bomb. The last was "The Snake Book," published in 1981. He has made more than 160 expeditions to remote destinations.
A 1971 divorce left him bitter, so he threw away many of his cameras and stopped taking pictures. He once invested his personal savings in a new television series about a 25-year-old zoologist's adventures, shot 39 episodes and couldn't sell it. "She really has a special charisma with animals," he insists to this day.
On August 9th, 2010 Pinney died at the age of 98, just four days before his 99th birthday.
Pinney lived in Sanderson's former apartment, as he had since the divorce, surrounded by artifacts from endangered cultures, an undisclosed number of snakes, and 50,000 aging photographs.
Read more about this topic: Roy Pinney
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