There is an old saying that “the only truly dead are those who have been forgotten.”
In my possession is a group photograph of twenty-three news photographers all lined up with their cameras. In the bottom row second from the left is a photog crouched over what they then called a “hand camera.” He is one of those forgotten names – Charles Ralphael ‘Charlie’ Traub. Since all of Charlie’s contemporaries that knew him either personally or professionally have since long past on themselves, his name and story is one of those that has faded away from the collective memory of news photographers.
Next Tuesday will be the eighty-third anniversary of Charlie’s last assignment. On March 13, 1929, Charlie was assigned to cover Lee Bible’s speed record attempt in the White Triplex at Daytona Beach, Florida. He would never come home from that assignment. Instead he became the second news photographer to die in the line of duty while covering the news.
Charlie’s death would send shock-waves through the newsreel community. In the aftermath of Traub’s death, for the first time that the practice of the newsreel outfits of promoting the “daredevil cameraman” who would do anything for shooting a few feet of film would be openly questioned in trade magazines. Today no news photographer would be finding him or herself standing directly on the yellow line on the track itself at Daytona during a race. But back in those early days when the lust for speed was held on the beach itself you had no choice when it came to obtaining dramatic angles. It was either get close to get the shot no matter the danger or get a new job.
Very little has been handed down in the eighty plus years since that fateful day at Daytona Beach about Charlie’s life before his death with the sole exceptions that he was a veteran of many years behind a newsreel camera for Pathe and previously Hearst-Selig, was married and had a seven-year-old daughter. As a sad postscript to the tragic story of the Traubs, his widow Edith died a little less than two years later in a Tampa house fire.
It was only last year, a mere eight decades after Pathe News editor Ray Hall lauded his late photographer as “a member of the great anonymous army” that gathered the news for the public good, that Traub was finally memorialized alongside the names of his fellow fallen journalists.