Prize Shot

Early one morning last May a middle-aged Brooklyn housewife named Rose Samanoff stepped briskly out of her home, started down the street to buy some food for her large family. Stopping at the corner to get a newspaper, she was about to cross the street when she was frozen in her tracks by the sight of two speeding automobiles coming together at the intersection, by the sound of shrieking brakes, screeching tires. That was the last Rose Samanoff ever saw, ever heard. To avoid a collision, one of the cars swerved up on the sidewalk, struck her a deadly blow, turned over on its side.

In the Brooklyn police bureau of the New York Daily News a staff photographer named Robert Flint Cranston got word that a woman had been killed in a traffic accident about three miles away. In fifteen minutes Cameraman Cranston was on the scene of what promised to be a dull, routine assignment. The street corner was jammed with Brooklynites pushing and shoving to get a glimpse of Rose Samanoff's corpse lying on the pavement. Police reserves arrived, shooed off all but newsmen and one man who leaned against a doorway and wept. Photographer Cranston saw him approach the body, stare in bewilderment at it, sob, put his hand to his wet eyes. Finding a spot where he could get a picture showing automobile, corpse and man, Cranston made two shots. Back at his office later he learned from a reporter that the weeping man was Rose Samanoff's husband who, seeing the crowd in the street, had pushed in to discover that the victim of sudden death on the sidewalk was his wife.

Last week, as judges, 75 picture editors, magazine publishers, advertising art directors and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia ambled about Manhattan's Rockefeller Center, squinted critically at some 300 pictures of the Press Photographers' Association exhibit. When they had seen everything, they decided that the best spot newspicture in the lot was that of the sorrowing Samanoff, awarded first prize to Cameraman Cranston.

Two other spot news prize-winners also were the work of the News's able camera staff. To Philip Levine went second prize for a close-up of one fear-filled eye of the late Jack (''Legs") Diamond peering over the shoulder of a detective (TIME, Jan. 12, 1931). To John Tresilian went third prize for an action shot of a Communist riot on Manhattan's East Side.

New England-born Robert Cranston, now 38, began photography while in the Navy during the War. After his discharge he took newspictures for Brooklyn papers until he got a job on the News in 1924. Since last August he has been doing experimental color photography for the News's Sunday supplement.

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