UPI Photographer Became Assistant to President Ford

Arnold "Pappy" Noel, 86, a newsreel and still photographer for United Press International who later became special assistant to President Gerald R. Ford and a Shenandoah Valley restaurateur, died July 4 of cancer at his home in Front Royal, Va.

Mr. Noel filmed historic events from his Washington base in the 1960s and 1970s, including wars in Central America, marches on Washington and Selma, Ala., riots in Washington and Detroit, early NASA space shots and the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.

He left UPI in 1975 to join the Ford administration for 18 months, then retired to the Shenandoah Valley, where he started a restaurant, My Father's Mustache, in 1976, which he ran for 14 years.

A colorful creature of the news trade, Mr. Noel's broom-shaped mustache, which sometimes became a handlebar mustache or a full beard, helped distinguish him from the older Frank E. "Pappy" Noel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer for the rival Associated Press. The AP's Mr. Noel died in 1966.

Arnold Clement Noel was born in Southbridge, Mass., and after high school joined the Army Air Corps in 1940. He served as a B-29 tail gunner in the Pacific theater during World War II. It was there that he picked up the nickname "Pappy" because he was the youngest member of the flight crew but had the most children.

After the war ended, he stayed in the military and transferred to the new Air Force. He was assigned to the secretary of defense's public affairs office, where he learned the skills of a news film cameraman and aerial photographer. He filmed atomic testing in the South Pacific, the Strategic Air Command base at Goose Bay, Labrador, and U.S. military involvement in Vietnam in 1962. He retired from the Air Force later that year and was hired by UPI.

Among the highlights of his news career was going along on a 1969 trip by the converted oil tanker-to-icebreaker SS Manhattan, the first commercial ship to sail the Northwest Passage, in a bid to seek a better route for Alaskan oil producers.

He was president of the White House News Photographers Association from 1972 to 1974, overseeing the awards banquet as many political celebrities steered clear and women protested their exclusion from the long-standing men-only event.

"Women's Lib has hurt us," a grim Mr. Noel told Washington Post reporter William Gildea at the time, although he had tried to lift the ban on women. "We tried to get it through. It didn't get far."

After he left the newswire and the White House press office, he moved from Alexandria and opened his Front Royal restaurant, housed in an old Victorian home. He ran it while serving two terms on the Front Royal Airport Commission. He sold the restaurant in 1990.

He enjoyed vacationing along the East Coast, salmon fishing in New York state and hiking on North Carolina mountain trails.

His wife of 61 years, Marjorie A. Cameron Noel, died in 2005.

Survivors include a companion, Patricia Cudworth of Hillsboro, N.C.; four children from his marriage, Claudia Frazier of Estes Park, Colo., Shawn Noel of Lewes, Del., Michael and Trace Noel, both of Front Royal; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.