Why Mervyn Freeman of Universal Newsreel was astride that hippo back in 1936 has been lost to time, however it is know than animals was one of his favorite subjects to shoot.

All these decades later, I’ve found very little work that can be accurately determined to have been his work asides from the submarine one.

One is the 1942 footage of the US Navy’s bombardment of the Marshall Islands during World War Two. Mervyn served as the civilian newsreel pool photog for that battle.

The other is the 1937 New London School explosion. Mervyn was ordered to fly from San Francisco to New London for that disaster. He ended up spending 72 hours straight shooting what he would declare later to be the worst story he had ever covered. By the time he was relieved by another crew, the sights of dead children around him and constantly winding his Eyemo was enough to have forced Freeman, a veteran of covering bloody wars in Asia, to spend a week on the sick list.