Veder's family on Wednesday confirmed that the retired Associated Press photojournalist died in his sleep, just eight days shy of his 100th birthday, at his home in El Dorado County, California, outside of Sacramento.
"You could tell, even at a distance, what they were feeling. It was all over them, their faces, the way they all broke into a run. There was a surge of emotion from the crowd, too," Veder said in a 2015 interview with The Guardian.
FILE - Released prisoner of war Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm is greeted by his family at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, Calif., as he returns home from the Vietnam War, March 17, 1973. (AP Photo/Sal Veder, File) Sal VederThe photo became a symbol of the end of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. But for Stirm, it represented heartbreak as he had been handed a "Dear John" letter from his wife, Loretta, by a chaplain upon his release and the couple divorced a year later. Stirm died in 2025.
He worked as a sports writer and news editor at several publications and, in 1961, he was hired as a staff photographer by The Associated Press at its Sacramento bureau. Later, he transferred to the San Francisco office, which is where he was based when he took the prize-winning photograph.
Daly, friends and former colleagues remembered Veder as a kind and humble person who loved to ice skate and sail. He mentored younger photographers and always took time to ask the people around him how they were doing that day.
Eric Risberg, a retired AP photographer who worked in San Francisco, said Veder was a great mentor and teacher.
Among his many assignments, Veder took photographs of the late Ronald Reagan when he was California governor, university campus protests against the war in Vietnam, the bank robbery trial of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, and the assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk by disgruntled former city supervisor Dan White in 1978.
In April 2025, Lorrie Kitching, another of Stirm's children, spoke to CBS News Sacramento to reflect on that moment frozen in time by Veder.
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Har, a former AP journalist, contributed reporting previously for this story. AP reporters Randy Herschaft in New York and Olga R. Rodriguez in San Francisco contributed to this report.
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