Stanley Forman might be the only person to parlay a diploma from Revere High School into two legendary Pulitzer Prizes (plus a third as a member of the Boston Herald American photo staff) and a Nieman Fellowship at ?Harvard.

“I far exceeded any expectations people had for me,” he said yesterday, from inside a cozy Revere nook called The Bagel Bin, “or any expectations I had for myself.”

Stanley is too modest. No, no that’s not quite true. But as one who’s known him as a friend and colleague for the better part of 35 years, it is undeniably true that this 67-year-old son of a local bandleader remains one of the best news photographers in the history of Boston journalism.

The moments he captured in a split second will stand the test of time. Who hasn’t seen “The Soiling of Old Glory,” Forman’s classic shot of a white teen using the flag to spear Boston attorney Ted Landsmark during an anti-busing rally near City Hall plaza on April 5, 1976.

Stanley won the Pulitzer for that photo, which came after his Pulitzer for the heart-wrenching image on July 22, 1975, of a young woman falling to her death during a fire in the Back Bay.

Stanley recalled it as “a routine rescue gone bad.” He arrived at the back of ?129 Marlborough St. in time to document what he thought was going to be a ladder rescue of a young woman and the toddler she was caring for. But when the fire escape gave way, Forman froze Diana Bryant and 2-year-old Tiare Jones in free fall.

Bryant fell five stories to her death. Tiare Jones survived, her fall cushioned by Bryant’s body. Forman’s photo triggered a national revamping of building safety codes.

“You can be good,” Stanley said, “but if you’re not lucky, it ain’t gonna happen. And luck, as Leo Durocher once said, is the residue of hard work.”

And no one was better at the work it took to “make” a great news shot, to navigate the city streets before GPS and MapQuest, to decipher the squawk of multiple police dispatchers and pick out the right call amid the din.

“I wanted to be a cop or a firefighter and then one day my father gave me a camera and said why don’t you take pictures?” Stanley said. “So, in a way, I became both a cop and firefighter, because I always wanted to be where the action was.”

Whether it was a barn fire at Suffolk Downs, or the poignant rescue of an 88-year-old Chinese garment worker, poised to jump off a window ledge five stories above Chauncy Street, Stanley was always where the action was.

Forman has documented his work in an e-book called, “Before Yellow Tape,” a reference to the access he enjoyed that no longer exists. It is a gripping testament to the skilled Revere kid who always managed to be where the action was.