Newsreelers

At Daytona Beach, Fla., in front of a crowd kept in safety by marshals, some newsreel photographers pointed their cameras last week at the snouted White Triplex car roaring toward them at 202 m. p. h. over the hard sand. The car swerved. Driver Lee Bible lost control. The car somersaulted prodigiously toward the cameras. When it lay still, Driver Bible, thrown far away, and one of the photographers, a big fellow named Charles Traub, crushed by three tons of pitchpoling steel, were dead. The film of the accident, complete in Traub's camera, went out at once to Pathe exhibitors.

Once the staid recorders of fires, parades, baby-shows and ship launchings, newsreel photographers are now famed for the risks they take. Three weeks before his death, Newsreeler Traub went down in the submarine 54. In a bathing suit, with water up to his neck, with his camera mounted near the engineroom ceiling, he photographed the crew escaping one by one with "artificial lungs" (TIME Feb. 18). The device was a success, but not for Traub. He stayed where he was until the U. S. S. Mallard on the surface pumped the submarine full of air at high pressure, bringing her up but making Traub deaf for a while.

Other photographers who have suffered or barely escaped violent fates:

Karl W. Fasold (Pathe). He turned his crank while Racer Frank Lockhart's car, upset by a blow-out in a time-trial last year, somersaulted over his head in one of its giant bounds.

Fatty Randolph (International) kept cranking when a flood in Washington had torn from the bank an ice-floe on which he was standing. Neither his camera nor his body were ever found.

Louis Hutt (Paramount) did not drop his camera when the propeller of a plane on the wing of which he was riding cut off part of his hand.

Russell Muth (Fox) turned the crank though volcanic gas dizzied him and the woman pilot who was steering his plane round the crater of Vesuvius. As the plane hit a tree near the rim of the crater, he saved his pictures by throwing the camera into some brushwood.

Thomas Baltzell (Pathe). Marooned on a wrecked plane for twelve hours when his flight from Manhattan to Rio de Janeiro was interrupted, he got pictures of the wreck.

E. J. Kaho (Fox) took a film of Mexican Guerilla Pancho Villa. Villa demanded the picture or Kaho's life. Kaho gave him raw film, escaped with the real one.

C. T. Pritchard (Pathe) risked death dozens of times for pictures. He was killed bya Ford while crossing Michigan Ave., Chicago.

Cliff Perry (Fox) went home to wash up after shooting a jailbreak in Miami. He was electrocuted by the heater in his bathtub.