Remembering Tom Newby—The Cackle
The finest Powerboat magazine photographer to ever release a shutter, Tom Newby died in a helicopter accident 15 years ago today. And every year on this date, as you’ve probably noticed if you’re a regular reader, either speedonthewater.com co-publisher Jason Johnson or I write about him.
A couple of Powerboat magazine road warriors on assignment, Tom Newby and Jason Johnson caught an Afroman concert in rural Georgia in 2007.
Much as he enjoyed his job, Newby wasn’t “doing what he loved” when he died. If that were true, he’d have been surfing when he passed. Or playing with his then-young sons, Wes and Will, in the Pacific Ocean. Or washing down sushi with Japanese beer and sake while cackling and entertaining everyone around him with great stories.
Little-known secret? Newby was an excellent sailor. He preferred shooting sailboats.
But there was no money in that. So photographing powerboats had to do and he worked his butt off to become the best of the best.
Yet his profession never defined him. Photography was the last thing he wanted to talk about. Cornered to talk shop by his fellow shooters, he’d bolt at the first opportunity. Chatting about the craft bored him. He much preferred to live in and enjoy the moment.
That’s how Newby and Johnson ended up—40-ounce malt liquors in hand—at an Afroman concert in August, Ga., one weekend when they were covering a tunnel boat race for Powerboat in mid-2007.
“Tom and I were eating lunch in between races and we noticed a poster an Afroman performance in town that evening and he looked at me with a huge grin and said, ‘We should go,’ and of course, me being the live music fan that I am and him knowing that, we decided to go,” Johnson told me. “Seeing Afroman in that small venue with Tom was probably my best memory of him—either that or the time we went to a University of Tennessee game by boat and he climbed up this old railroad bridge to get the perfect shot of all the boats tied up at the docks with the stadium in Neyland Stadium in the background.”
That’s also how—years earlier at the magazine’s Performance Trials in Panama City Beach, Fla.—Newby convinced me to help him hide recently deceased bait in a parked van one of our colleagues was renting for the next four days. We cackled so hard as we stashed the smelly stuff that I was sure the van shook.
Behind it all that was Newby’s refusal to let himself or anyone around him get bored on assignment. So during the early days of Powerboat magazine covering the Lake of the Ozarks Shootout from a media-boat in the spectator fleet—now that was a long day—he invented a game called “Over or under?”
After each boat passed, Newby would call out a speed. One of us had to say whether we thought the number was high or low. If that person was wrong, or Newby was right on the money as he often was, he won.
Believe it or not, he won more than he lost. And he cackled every time he won.
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