Evening star., 1925-07-05
BY C. MORAN.

II Y AIRBREATH HARRY leaps
from a century ffier into a
racing automobile; he crawls
Il 4 out on the wing of a plane
and drops off into space; he
leaps a good dozen feet across yawn-
ing chasm. jumps off a high cliff into
the Atlantic Ocean, and is picked up
by a submarine.
Great stuff! Action, Camera!
But what of the unseen camera man
who really outmatches every seeming
ly superhuman effort depicted on the
screen? Uncle Sam recently has been
getting into this business of producing
hair-raising movies and has developed
in. Washington a staff of camera men
whose experiences read like a dime
novel.
George r. Goergens, chief cinema
tographer for the United States De
partment of Agriculture, has been at
deaths door in the performance of his
public duties probably more times
than any other civilian in Government
service. They say at the Department
of Agriculture that Goergens has the
proverbial nine lives.
While shooting scenes from an
airplane in forest patrol work, he fell
in the plane a distance of 200 feet.
The plane was smashed to pieces and
Goergens was hauled out cut in 3S
different places and with broken
knee cap. He was laid up for six
months during which time his Gov
ernment leave ran out, and because
there is no provision for compensation
in such cases he was compelled TO
bear the cost of his illness out of his
own pocket.
Another of his miraculous escapes
was when taking pictures of dust eX-
plosions at the Bureau of Mines plant
TDxX& iaf1 n "a q
been shown all over the country in
teaching safety first lessons in indus
trial plants where the menace of eX-
plosions of sugar, grain, starch and
other dusts is ever present.
Goergens was housed in portable
telephone booth brought to the scene
to serve as a shelter and placed with
the solid board side of the booth
turned toward the mouth of the eX-
plosion cylinder. The shelter was
set less than 100 feet from the cylin-
der, and just enough to one side to
be out of the direct line of the blast.
A hole was cut in the wall of the
booth through which the camera was
trained on the scene of the explosion.
During each of the first two blasts
the operator was somewhat shaken
by the detonations, but the shocks
were relatively light. and their effect
uIJlo more IIldll lSIilHOId dl y. " III
the setting off of an explosion OF
starch dust. however, the earth seem
ed to tremble, the booth rocked on
it's foundations, and reports received
later showed that houses two and
three miles away were shaken.
The concussion shattered the glass
| in the walls of the telephone booth,
and Goergens was temporarily blind
ed. Only his long professional training
kept him turning the crank Of the
camera. Climbing out from the
about and found that some of the
engineers who had stood at a con-
siderable distance to witness the test
| had been thrown to the ground. AS
soon as they recovered their senses
they ran to the telephone booth. fear
ing that Goergens had been killed.
| X X ~
EXAMINATION of the Bureau of
~ Mines equipment showed that
| the concrete foundations had been
shattered by the violence of the blast
and part of the shelves within had
been blown out and reduced to
! kindling, while the target or defect
| ing screen which stood some dis
tance from the open mouth of the
| cylinder had been partly torn from
| it's deeply laid foundations. Motion
picture men declare that in the whole
history of the industry. few movie
views of this sort have been taken
under such hazardous circumstances.
Nothing so violent, and destructive
as the detonations which occurred
was looked for by the engineers
present, who frequently had set off
charges in the same plant in connec-
] ton with studies of mine explosions.
The experiments offered soverwhelm-