Well since no one remembers Robin Still (b-roll today must be really dead these days…), anyone out there who could shed some light onto another forgotten fotog in my files?

Leon H. Giroux worked for KRON starting back in the late 1950s up until August 9, 1960 when he was assigned to cover the arrest of some protestors at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. While en-route to cover the story, according to a single newspaper article I have, he apparently realized he was falling ill on the highway near Pleasanton and pulled over. Giroux managed to get out of his vehicle when he collapsed onto the highway shoulder. Despite two truck drivers stopping to render assistance, Giroux was dead of an apparent heart attack before the ambulance arrived. He was only 34.

Despite 53 years passing since, does his name ring a bell for anyone? I can’t find anything on him asides from the news report in the Oakland Tribune and a report online from a funeral home noting he was buried at Calvary Cemetery in Santa Monica.

Thanks to Norman Alley, Harry Birch, Fred Felbinger and Charles Peden chronicling the activities of their colleagues for posterity, its easy to find information on the lives and times of the majority of newsreel photographers. Television on the other hand, not so much. Just names on the backs of  photographs and nothing more.

Giroux among others deserves to be remembered for how they lived rather than the details of how they died.