Browsing through The Commons on Flickr, I came across this interesting photo from Lakehurst in 1936 that was posted by the DeGolyer Library of Southern Methodist University. There’s a story behind that photo, a lesson from the past if you could call it that. A reminder that even the most mundane of stories can turn memorable ones within an instant.

Back when the German Zeppelins flew, the editor of Fox Movietone News, Truman Talley, had a feeling that someday a major incident would occur involving one of the Zeppelins since they used hydrogen instead of helium for lifting. As a result, Talley had standing orders that two full Movietone crews would be at Lakehurst for every single landing of the airships despite his crews protesting of having to cover what had become a routine event. To put it in modern terms, it would be like going over to the nearest major airport and shooting a story on every single airliner that arrived from overseas.

I’m not sure who the photog on the right side is, but the newsreel photog on the car roof on the left of the photo is Al Gold of Fox Movietone News. Gold was one of the cameramen who usually was assigned the airship arrival story and he hated it. Non-stop bitching about it and yet he went off and covered it anyway.

That ordinary story turned into one of history’s most remembered spot news stories a few months after Robert Richie shot this image of Gold covering what he once thought was a story that had no news value and wasn’t worth his time to cover.