behind the camera in pictures
A NBC crew shows off a portable electronic camera during the early 70s in Washington D. C.
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.
George Gore, cameraman with NBC News, talks about covering the Greenlease kidnapping story in October of 1953.
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.
Another tale from NBC News cameraman George Gore dating from 1954.
When William Remington, who was in the Washington political spotlight, was murdered by fellow inmates at the Bellefonte Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, I was assigned by N.B.C. to get a film story for release the same day.
When I arrived in Bellefonte, after visiting two funeral homes, I learned at the last one that the undertaker was just leaving to pick up the Remington body at the penitentiary. After phoning the penitentiary, I was told that no pictures would be permitted within their gates. However, I coaxed the undertaker to let me ride in the hearse. When we were on the forbidden grounds, I quickly got out and climbed inside a parked car, unseen by the guards. As the hearse left the building with the body, I filmed the necessary footage and, as it passed by, jumped in and completed my story as we arrived at the funeral home.
As a follow-up, I later filmed another story when the two suspected teen-aged murderers were scheduled to be arraigned before a judge at Clearfield, Pennsylvania. The night before, I was told by a hotel manager that the father of one of the boys had asked him for permission to sleep in a lobby chair for the night, as he was broke. The father had been given bus fare by neighbors in Georgia, and had just made an all-day bus ride without anything to eat. It was suggested that he could get food and shelter in a cell bed at the jailhouse.
Early the next morning, I visited the sheriff. After explaining the object of my presence, I was taken to the distracted father, who was suffering from cancer. As I interviewed the father, our conversation was picked up by N.B.C. in New York via telephone and tape for radio broadcast within an hour.
The father told me he had not seen his young son for more than a year since he ran away, and asked me if I could help him. I felt sorry for this sadden father who had traveled so far to see his son, so I devised a plan for him. He accepted my offer of a job to hold a movie light at the courthouse, so he would be able to see his son. We filmed the two boys, handcuffed to the guards, being brought into the courthouse and, later, their departure as they got into a waiting car. The father, beside me, made a pathetic picture as he gave a little wave as the car pulled away. This last pathetic scene provided a heart-rendering touch to the film story.
Later, while shooting a close-up scene of the judge, I told him about the father wanting to see his son and that he was waiting outside for me.
When the judge asked if I thought he should be allowed to see him, I said, “Judge, I am a father, and I suppose you are; and we, in the same circumstances, would expect help.”
The father had tears in his eyes as I told him to jump into my car. I dropped him off to see his son at the penitentiary where a meeting had been arranged by the judge.
Later, I was pleased to receive the following note from Len Allen, N.B.C. news editor:
“You will be happy to know that Today’s News thought you had done a very good and enterprising job on the Remington arraignment. Injecting the scene of the father made the story. All court stories of this nature are fundamentally routine, since you can’t do much more than get grab shots of the defendant coming and going. But adding the cut-aways on the father made all the difference in the world. The script was built entirely around him. Nice work.”
George Gore, cameraman for FOX Movietone News, NBC News and WTAE-TV, related in his autobiography a story he covered for NBC in 1953 where he nearly found himself in a bit trouble due to a mistaken identification.
Len Allen, NBC news editor, assigned me to cover a story involving an incident which happened within twelve miles of my home. The story concerned a Pennsylvania “turnpike killer,” who was then being sought. Little did I suspect that I would be mistaken for the killer while in the process of filming the story.
Truckers were warned by radio and the press not to pull their rigs off the highway to park. Truckers had a habit of doing this to take a nap when they become drowsy. One trucker had already been murdered while asleep in the cab of his truck.
As I was driving along the turnpike, five miles west of Somerset, I noticed a large truck parked off to the side, so I stopped to investigate. As I approached the truck, sure enough, there was a truck driver taking a snooze on the front seat. As I got up on the running board and looked in, the driver sleepily opened his eyes. As I quickly leaned over to film the incident, a state trooper going by saw me crouched up on the running board and thought that here he had the killer – caught in the act! When he came up to me, I turned around and assured him that although I was about to shoot the sleeping driver – it was with my camera, for a film story to be used on the NBC news. As it was, his presence added to the value of the story.
While he admonished the trucker, I started shooting and completed the sequence of the trooper directing to the trucker to move on and a final scene of the trucker driving his rig onto the turnpike. I was thankful the trooper was satisfied, after his cautious approach, that I was not the “turnpike killer,” but was just doing my work.
The climax to this search ended a week later, when the killer was captured. I shot another story of his arraignment in Greensburg.
(top) An unidentified television cameraman crouches alongside police in Winston-Salem, NC, after police were fired upon when they went to investigate a theft at the Black Panther headquarters in 1971. [source: Fang, I. E.. Television News.]
(bottom) NBC News cameraman Charles Ray and correspondent Corky Gibbons tape a segment in Greensboro, NC on February 1st, 1982 over Greensboro being named one of the best places to live. [source: Ray, Charles. The Life of a Network Newsreel Cameraman.]