Capturing Santa Monica: Bill Beebe

Bill Beebe (b1927) was a preeminent local photojournalist whose 1962 image of John F. Kennedy emerging from the Santa Monica surf was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Beebe was born in West Los Angeles and moved to Santa Monica as a child.

After joining the Navy during high school, he developed an interest in photography and was one of the first to major in the subject at Santa Monica College (then SMCC) in 1946.

After graduating from Santa Monica College, Beebe joined Emerson Gaze’s Pacific Press Photos, a group of photographers who provided images to local news organizations.

Beebe then spent ten years working for the Los Angeles Mirror, where he won multiple photojournalism awards.

After the Mirror merged with the Los Angeles Times, he stayed on as a staff photographer until 1963.

Beebe moved to the Evening Outlook in the 1960s, where he devoted three decades to capturing Santa Monica notables and happenings.

Patients at the Kabat-Kaiser Institute (later known as Kaiser Permanente), a center for those with neurological disorders.

Beebe was an avid conservationist and edited a regular outdoor column for the Evening Outlook.

Beebe retained the rights to the images he produced while working for the Evening Outlook, and upon the newspaper’s closure in 1998, generously donated his collection of over 100,000 negatives to the Santa Monica History Museum.

Beebe’s images are an invaluable resource for the museum and are used on a regular basis by academic researchers, members of the public, and fellow journalists.

Upon being honored with a lifetime achievement award from the Los Angeles Press Photographers Association in 2000, Beebe said, “My job was my hobby. Didn’t make much money, but I made a lot of friends and had a lot of fun.”