grab that bolex (a Silent Film News Camera)

I was always a news junkie.  As a young boy I watched the evening news with Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley and Chet Huntley. When my 10-year-old buddies were outside riding bikes and playing sandlot baseball, I was inside watching the evening news!  Current Events was always my favorite subject in school, and I wanted to be in the news business. In fact, with my tongue planted firmly in my cheek, I often tell everybody that will listen, that I started working in the news business when I was just 11 years old - when I had a paper route!   

I never grew out of my addiction to watching the news and wanting to know what was going on in the world. By the time I was in the eighth grade I was encouraged by Dorothy Fisch, my English teacher, to think about pursuing some sort of journalism or advertising as a career path. 

In the years before college my social, athletic, and church activities left the thought of journalism in my rear view mirror, but I tuned in every night to hear Walter Cronkite sign off the news by saying, "And, that's the way it is on this Day and Date."

As I entered Harding College I chose to major in Mass Communication. I knew by choosing that major I could go in to journalism or many other directions that had lots of opportunities in that career field.

In the Spring of 1976, the Harding Mass Communication graduates first made their presence known at KATV Channel 7, an ABC network affiliate in Little Rock, Arkansas. Paul Woodhouse, who was in the first class of Mass Communication majors at Harding, was sent to channel 7 as an intern working in the stations production department. 

In the Fall ’76 of I was the second intern sent to the station but the first to be placed in the News Department. Even though I had worked at a radio station as an announcer, the university’s yearbook publication as a photographer, and an advertising sales executive for broadcast and print mediums, I was wide-eyed and scared-to-death, but absolutely in disbelief that I was in a position such as I was to be in a real newsroom.

My duties as a news intern?  Of course, to do whatever I was told to do! Some of it made me feel as if I was a part of the story telling process, but much of it was degrading, Degrading because most of my assignments had little or nothing to do with the news of the day. I was the one who made the lunch runs, got coffee for the directors and anchors, and even ran personal errands for the ones who laughed and delighted in pushing me down the totem pole of significance.  What they didn’t know was that I was already at the bottom of the pecking order and there was nowhere to go but up.  I wanted to rebel and resist, but I knew I would only be sent home and would then not be able to watch the current events of the day unfold from a front row seat as I did every night at 6:00 o’clock when the “red-light” went on and the stage manager pointed his finger to Steve Barnes and Fred DeBrine that signaled, “We are on the Air.”
 
It wasn’t until the newsroom editors and producers understood that I was a working professional photographer that they started giving me some minor assignments that would use my skill set and help them in the needed elements for producing that day’s news. Slowly I started gaining some modicum of credibility.

I vividly remember one of the first pieces of film that I shot that made it on the air, (yes 100% of the daily news field footage was shot on 16 mm motion picture film, processed at the station, hand cut and edited for the newscast EVERY evening), happened when I was told by the assignment editor Bob Steel, to “grab that Bolex,” a hand-held, silent camera, and try to get some footage of a perp-walk of John Elliot Gruzen, the arrested suspect (later convicted) for the murder of a 12-year-old girl in Vilonia, Arkansas, named Dana Diane Mize. 
 
Why was I sent on this assignment by myself as an intern?  Because there was literally nobody else available in the newsroom, or out on assignment, that could get to the perp-walk location in time to get this footage.  The assignment editor was about to pull his hair out in angst when I very calmly said, “Give me a news camera, send me there and I can get it done for you.” 
 
“But you’re a ^&*#*% - ^&*#*^ intern!” He shouted, “I can’t send you out to get the biggest news story of the year!” 
 
“Well, the way I see it,” I said, “you have three choices; One - Don’t send me to do this, and you won’t have it on the news tonight.  Two - Send me, I don’t get the shot, and you still don’t have it. Or three, send me, I get the shot, and we HAVE it on the news tonight!”  I stood there quietly waiting for a response for what seemed like eternity, but in reality, it was more likely a nano-second, before he said, “Grab that blankety-blank Bolex!”
 
Steel was about to show me how to load the film, and how to use the camera, when I took it out of his hands and said, “I know how to do all of that. We’re wasting time, I gotta go!”
 
After taking the camera and loading it with a fresh roll of film, I headed out as quickly as I could.  Driving faster than I should have, I arrived at the Faulkner County courthouse in Conway in about 30 minutes. There were already several county, state, and local police squad cars waiting for the suspect to be brought to the courthouse after being detained in the county jail facility before this hearing. 
 
I surveyed the lay of the land, found out where the vehicle transporting the alleged killer Gruzen would be stopping, which route, and what door he would be escorted to for entry into the building.  I staked out my first position leaning up against a tree for camera stability, and then a second position up a short flight of stairs that led into the rear entrance of the building that was also a loading dock.  It gave me a wall to lean on for stability and a perfect position to shoot the entire perp-walk, but halfway through the walk I would have to stop and run from one position to the other.
 
Aside from my nervous anticipation of capturing the story as it unfolded, I realized quickly there were two technical issues; because part of the path was in bright sunshine, and part was in flat shade, the footage would require a changing exposure, and a long path requiring a changing focal length. Short of walking backwards, which I was very uncertain about executing, I chose two different static shooting positions.
 
The Bolex did have a hand operated Zoom lens allowing me to do so as much as I deemed necessary to get the entire walk from the car and into the building.  That was the easy part because the camera was made to move the Zoom stick on the lens while the film reel was operating.
 
The other technical issue was exposure. These were the days before cameras had automatic and dynamic exposure change. If the exposure change was going to happen, I had to manually change the f-stop by hand.  I knew the bright sunlight exposure would require an F16 exposure, but I didn’t know what f-stop I would need in the shaded area of the loading dock entrance. I didn’t have a light meter, so I was just going to have to guess. I figured if I could get the sunlight area correct, and that’s all I got because of exposure error, then I would be OK.
 
I got into position and I waited… soon the officers who had radio contact announced to the crowd that they were almost there. A minute or so later the convoy of cars pulled up, and the Sherrif’s transport cruiser stopped at the spot just I had been told it would.  I was rolling film, and it was purring along just fine.  The car stopped; two officers opened the door and help a very sickly and frail looking John Elliot Gruzen to his feet. The suspect had been on a hunger strike protesting his arrest, and hadn’t eaten in days, maybe weeks.  The two officers had to hold him up and make him walk while holding him from collapsing. 
 
It was a very slow developing perp-walk, perhaps because of his leg chains and handcuffs.  As soon as they passed me and walked out of my frame. I turned off the camera and sprinted on ahead up the pathway and to the top of the stair landing to my next shooting position.  I zoomed in and because he was still out in the sunshine, I kept the exposure at f16.  But as soon as he walked under the roof area that was shaded, I instinctively opened that exposure dial all the way to whatever the slowest lens speed was, probably about f2.8. At the same time, I pulled back the zoom to its widest focal length (while still leaning against the wall) and had the camera follow him up the stairs and through the door into the building.
 
I’m not sure I had what I needed, and the newsroom wanted, but I had something! I was anxious to get back to the station to find out.  I think I drove faster back to the station than I did when I left the station to go to the Faulkner County courthouse.
 
As I ran into the newsroom, I was holding up the Bolex Camera in one hand and the undeveloped film in a canister in the other.  I briefly told the assignment editor what I did and then I ran downstairs to the film developing lab. As I handed it to the guy in charge of developing film, I asked him to get that film developed as soon as he could.
 
The busiest time of the day for a TV newsroom is the two hours before airtime. It was about 3 o'clock. We went on the air at 5:30 whether the film was ready or not.  It was always exciting to me to see the camera lights go on while the finger got pointed at the anchor and to go on the air with the lead story. Today my film, and first assignment on my own, was going to be the lead story of the day.
 
I was so nervous about what was on that film. After I retrieved the film from the lab I ran back upstairs and handed it to Ed Eaves the chief photographer who was also in charge of editing this story. He looked a little grumpy, partly because he was always cantankerous, and partly because he was wondering why I was the one that went out and shot that story?
 
Allow me a quick sidenote – Ed Eaves was always cantankerous, to everybody, but especially to me, the intern. Maybe because he was such a perfectionist and would not settle for any of the other photographers to be anything less than perfect.  But Ed Eaves was without a doubt the BEST news photographer and editor I’ve ever known, even to this day 50 years later!  I learned so much from him and am so grateful for his part of my professional development.
 
He put the film reel in the editing station, ran it through the monitor attached it properly to the take up reel, and started turning the film wheel. As he started looking at what I had filmed his eyes got bigger, and bigger! Even before finishing he turned, looked at me and said, “This is amazing Steve! How did you ever do this. You changed the exposure while the film was rolling!”
 
When he got through the entire reel, he rewound it took and ran out to the newsroom to the assignment editor and the managing editor Steve Barnes and said, “You guys have got to come see this!” As he racked it up again, he showed them what we had. And he had me tell them all how I got into my two shooting positions, and then my focal length and exposure issues. By then a crowd of other reporters, photographers and editors had gathered around trying to look over Ed’s shoulders to see what we had.  They were all pumped for what I had gotten and So. Was. I!
That was the day that I was finally admitted into the KATV newsroom fraternity and became one of one of them, a photojournalist and not just an intern. 
 
This may have been the most exciting story I ever covered. Even though it was one of my first, it wasn't like my entire career went downhill after that. In fact, I had some of the best moments of my life dealing with the people in the newsroom and working at an industry that I loved so much. 
 
To this day, that Gruzen perp-walk film story is in the archives of Arkansas journalism at the University of Arkansas Prior Center. If I can ever get a copy of that film converted to digital video I will repost it here.
 
In the Spring of ’77, as my internship was coming to a close, Jim Pitcock, the news director, offered me a job to stay on permanently as a full-time photographer.
 
I spent the next five years employed as a photojournalist at KATV, and I can honestly say, that outside the low pay, it was probably my favorite job I had form 1976 as an intern until I started as an assistant professor at Harding university in 2008
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