On this date in 1935, newsreel cameraman Allyn Prentice Alexander and soundman Lewis Sanford “Lew” Tappan of Fox Movietone News died while on assignment in a crash of a US Army Air Corps Martin B-12A bomber in the Sequoia National Forest near Cahoon Meadow.

Alexander was the third news cameraman to die while on the job in the U. S. and Tappan was the first soundman to be killed.

In the words of Lucille Alexander of her husband and his colleague’s deaths:

“They died for a scoop. It was a death they sought around the globe and found at home. They, and all newsreel cameramen and sound technicians are today’s historians. And the pages of history are always red with the blood of men who have died writing it.

Don’t you see, Allyn and Lewis weren’t primarily cameramen and sound technician. They were newspaper men – visual newspaper men.

To them the story, the assignment, was all important. Whatever fear they may have experienced during their years of service paled beside the knowledge that in their hands lay the success or the failure of a story.

Hundreds of hours out of their lives – and they were only 30 – were spent in the air.

Men, I suppose become inured to danger. Those who face it constantly learn to consider it abstractly and so do the women with whom they live.

This story that cost them their lives was a scoop. They were sent to record the maneuvers of the Hamilton Field bombing planes. The first problem they participated in was last Thursday. They dipped and swerved over Lake Tahoe, watching, photographing, recording the 16 planes as they fought imaginary battles.

When Allyn and Lewis returned home the next day, they remarked that if anything ever went wrong with the bomber there’d be no way in which they could escape. They spoke of the difficulty of jumping with a parachute.

That conversation now is a kind of ugly echo in my ears. But they spoke so nonchalantly, so calmly about it, I never dreamed their conversations would be so tragically demonstrated so soon.”