Floating Cameraman

Like livewire still cameramen (see p. 50), livewire newsreel photographers often go to extraordinary ends for a "new angle." Last week it looked for 50 wild minutes as if Paramount News Photographer Albert Mingalone had, like the AP's Keen, gone too far.

Photographer Mingalone picked Old Orchard Beach, Me., for secret experiments in overhead photography from a cluster of 30 hydrogen-filled stratosphere balloons. He had successfully ground out several reels over the local country club golf course while a ground crew towed him from spot to spot when suddenly a stiff gust snapped the 200-ft. sash-weight cord anchor line.

Locker-Boy Thomas Bowman jumped for the trailing fragment of anchor line, stumbled when he was about to grab it. As Aerialist Mingalone rose speedily, so did the alarm of his fellow Cameraman Philip Coolidge and his friend, Rev. James J. Mullen, Old Orchard priest, golfer, aviation enthusiast and expert skeetshooter who was watching the experiment.

Mingalone drifted away so rapidly that his ground crew had no time to use a rifle brought along to puncture the balloons in an emergency. With Mingalone disappearing in a rain cloud at 2,500 ft., frantic Cameraman Coolidge and Father Mullen piled into their auto, dashed toward Saco where Mingalone seemed to be heading. Two miles from the take-off their hopes rose as they sighted Balloonist Mingalone scudding along 600 ft. above. Rain had soaked his clothes, brought the balloons down-to 600 ft. Rifleman Mullen jumped from the car, chanced a shot at the balloons 25-ft. above Mingalone's head, missed. His second shot punctured two of the spheres. To the great relief of the rescue squad, Mingalone thereupon settled earthward. But at this point the floating cameraman, library scissors in his teeth, attempted to climb to a ring five feet above his head to saw free some more of the bags. Numb from the cold and soggy with rain, he tangled in the drooping anchor line, dropped his 12-lb. Bell & Howell camera. Loss of this ballast bobbed him upward and onward again.

Again the anxious men below dodged into their auto, sighted Mingalone three miles farther on, lost him once more while honking their way through a snarl of excited autoists on the Maine backroads. One motorist yelled that Mingalone's course had shifted him seaward. Another had spied him whipping along toward North Kennebunk Port.

Father Mullen and Cameraman Coolidge tore off in that direction. Twelve miles from the unlucky take-off the thoroughly frightened pair caught up with the even more frightened victim, still struggling with his parachute harness as he bounded rapidly along 200 ft. in the air.

Father Mullen sprinted into a cornfield, kneeled, plunked another balloon. That was all the exhausted, dripping Mingalone needed to bring him to earth. "Maybe I couldn't have kissed Father Mullen!" Mingalone wheezed. "All I could think of was 'the curtains.' "

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