The story behind the story from cameraman Dave Oliver of Universal Newsreel about him and Thomas Proffitt covering the March 1936 flood of Johnstown, including the panic that struck the town when a rumor spread that the South Fork Dam had broke and Johnstown was potentially facing a repeat of the 1889 disaster.

For those who have George Gore’s book, The People I Shot, there is a description of the same flood story from Gore’s point of view. Oliver and Proffitt are the “competitive newsreel cameramen” mentioned in Gore’s book on page 89.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjbXmxneBJc

The toughest assignment I had during the entire year was covering the recent floods. I don’t think it was as tough as going to Ethiopia, judging from what Howard Winner tells me, but any cameraman who had to shoot the floods will tell you that it was plenty tough.

I got my orders from Charles Ford, head of our newsreel, to go down to Johnstown, Pa., the heart of the Pennsylvania flood district. It looked as though they were going to have another washout like the one in 1889. That was on St. Patrick’s Day. Hughes, one of our New York office men and I left the city at 8:30 P.M. through snow, rain and high wind.

When we got near Harrisburg the water was over the roads to a depth of two feet. We were told that it was impossible to get through from Harrisburg. It certainly looked that way when the roads got so bad that they had to be staked out to show where they lay under the water. In Harrisburg we met Thomas Proffitt another cameraman, from Chester, Pa.

There was no railroad service west of Harrisburg. So Proffitt called the Highway Patrol and they told us that maybe we could get through to Johnstown if we went by way of Sunbury, Lewiston and Altoona. We tried it and it was terrible going. Between Sunbury and Lewiston we had to plow through creeks that had overflowed the road. The water came right up over the running board. Once we had to get a horse from a farmer to pull out of a creek. All this was between four and five in the morning.

We got into Lewiston around daybreak. Making our scenes in the flooded town made us forget about our chances of getting out of the town, and so when we were ready to leave, the roads were blocked. Bridges were being washed out. Whole houses were floating down the Juniata.

Water flowing over the wheels of the car gave us the idea that we were finished. There was only one chance to take and that was to go over the mountains where automobiles never go. The road is supposed to be passable only for horse and wagon but we tried it. On this adventure over the mountain we only had to be towed once when the water of a brook came over the floor boards.

We hit Johnstown at 1:30 P.M. and the town looked like a place of death; automobiles all over the streets turned upside down or on their sides and mud in the streets knee deep in places. Everyone you met had a bad word for you about conditions.

After finding out that no other news reel had gotten there we started to work. We were making scenes at the Haines Street bridge about three o’clock in the afternoon when someone shouted that the dam had gone out. In a minute it seemed that the whole town had gone crazy, as men, women and children stampeded for the hills.

I was lucky because I was on top of the car with my camera when the stampede started. Proffitt was shooting from the flat and when the stampede started he was jammed up against a pole and couldn’t film anything. I was able to keep on grinding and get a pretty complete story as people were knocked down on the street, run over by automobiles and trampled.

Knowing now that we had a picture for the screen, we proceeded to Altoona to ship the story to New York. We hadn’t had any sleep since Monday and it was now Wednesday night. Hughes and I were wondering how we were going to stay awake when Ford called us by phone and told us that we had to drive the films to Indiana, Pa., which was only 51 miles away but because of storms and fog, it took us five hours to make the drive.

Then at Indiana, our pilot and plane were grounded, so we had to take the films into Pittsburgh through more storms and floods to get to the airport and send them by plane to New York.

And so to bed…only to be wakened once more by Charles Ford, our editor, for more work.