Two prominent names of the era found in trade magazines were Louise Lowell of Fox News and Dorothy Dunn of Universal Newsreel. Sadly, very little information can be found on Lowell and Dunn asides from they existed and then faded out of the picture and into forgotten history.

Ever wonder where the term “bin” comes from in your NLE? Well, here you go.

And it was touted as giving a video photog just as much flexibility as a film photog too…

The camera Darringer is using is a Frezzolini conversion of a Auricon Cine-Voice with a body brace that puts the weight of the camera out front. Later news film camera models would eventually put the camera up on the shoulder instead.

The VTR is on the back of the staffer on the left, Percy Arrington in the center with the camera and a soundman on the right.

* James Pergola, photographer, Pathe News
* William Pitt, editor, Pathe News
* Charles Traube, photographer, Pathe News
* Allyn Alexander, photographer, Fox Movietone News
* Dan Prehus, photographer, KYW-TV
* Gary Brown, photographer, KREM-TV
* Mary Shore, reporter, KTVB-TV
* Dan Sullivan, photographer, KTVB-TV

And I’ve got another seven names of photographers I’ve found noted in passing in industry magazines I need to dig up more information on before I forward them…

One afternoon the Camel News Caravan editor of N.B.C. phoned and assigned me to film a story about one of the Greenlease kidnappers, who was still being hunted. He had last been seen by a grocery-store woman in Ohio.

I had only a couple hours to film this story and have it in Washington to be ready for the evening news release. I immediately phoned a flying service in Johnstown to have chartered plane ready. Before long we were flying over the city of Wheeling, West Virginia. I asked the pilot to circle over the area, so I could get an establishing area air scene. As he started to do so, we ran out of gas. He told me we were about to make a forced landing.

I had run out of gas with my car before but I didn’t bargain for this new experience. I silently prayed for a safe landing, and soon we were bouncing on to a field not too far away from the airport. We discovered the gas cap was missing. It had not been secured when the plane was last fueled and, as a result, all the gas had been siphoned out in the air.

My next problem was ground transportation. At the Wheeling Airport, I learned that the taxi had just left for the city. An airport employee was finishing his work in twenty minutes, so I hired him to drive me fifteen miles to a country store in Ohio. There in the store, the owner furnished me with a daily newspaper. I filmed a scene of the woman clerk excitedly pointing to the front page of the Wheeling Intellingencer at a picture of the kidnapper’s accomplice. She told me how she had spotted the man as he and a blond lady entered the store and bought several bottles of milk earlier that morning. It was known that an accomplice of Carl Hall and Bonnie Heady, the confessed kidnappers, had ulcers, and that he was with a blond companion somewhere in the area.

The next scene I filmed was of a highway patrolman stopping and checking cars at a roadblock on Route 40, not too far from the store in St. Clairsville, Ohio. This was enough for a rush story, so I put the film on a plane at the Wheeling Airport bound for Washington, D.C. At 6 P.M. I phoned the N.B.C. news desk to ascertain whether they had received the film package. After giving them the flight number of the plane, they again made a hurried search at the Washington Terminal. However, an hour later I was relieved to see the film featured on the N. B. C. network, ably narrated by John Carmeron Swayze.

As I was eating breakfast in the Wheeling Hotel the next morning, a lady reporter phoned and said she would like to interview me regarding my story, which had featured a close-up shot of the morning newspaper. After a quick interview with Miss Shal Southall at the breakfast table, I was checking over a map when I heard a knock at the door. It was a photographer from the paper who wanted to shoot a picture of me and my camera. I felt somewhat like a celebrity when the evening paper carried my picture with the caption: “He gets news when it’s news.” Under the picture another caption read: “No trouble, expense spared in N.B.C. coverage.” Then, in the story by Shal Southall of the News-Register staff, she mentioned that I lived up to the N.B.C. slogan, “Today’s News Today,” and how no expense was spared to film a feature story for our network news.

Little do people realize, sitting comfortably in their homes and watching the latest TV news, the many unseen difficulties that are encountered in preparing it. Teamwork is required; and it is that that helps to smooth off the rough edges.

Read: “Cameraman’s Luck” (PDF file)