The Press: 23 Minutes to Anywhere

Politicians and reporters, who rarely agree, found themselves united at last week’s Democratic Convention on one proposition: photographers can be a hell of a nuisance. At the few exciting moments, a human wall of cameramen lined the edge of the speakers’ platform. Some reporters in the press section were cut off from a view of the delegates on the floor, while the endless flashbulbs and shrill, insistent cries for “one more!” distracted the speakers.

When one testy Congressman shouted, “Why don’t you all go home?” a photographer growled back: “Why don’t you kiss my foot?” But this persistent, annoying hullabaloo paid off to newspapers and readers. The picture coverage of the Democratic Convention, and the G.O.P. Convention before it, was the most complete in journalistic history.

Acme, Associated Press and International News Photos, the three major picture services, and big newspapers and magazines had 275 photographers at the platform’s edge and spotted at strategic observation posts around Convention Hall. “Caddies” squatted near all photographers, and rushed their red-hot shots to darkrooms and distribution points.

Like the newsmen who covered both conventions, photographers found the Democratic show duller. There were not as many candidates, headquarters or angles to cover—and not as many chances for exclusives.

The Basement Trick. Top honors for speedy coverage of both conventions went to Acme, the Scripps-Howard picture service. Acme developed and transmitted pictures by wire direct from a 1,200-sq. ft. office set up in the basement of Convention Hall, at an estimated cost of $5,000. As a result, Acme moved pictures faster, and often got a better play in the press, than either of its rivals. A.P. lost time by developing and transmitting its pictures at the Philadelphia Bulletin (published by A.P. President Robert McLean), a mile and a half from Convention Hall. Hearst’s I.N.P. used a darkroom at the University of Pennsylvania, about a quarter of a mile away.

Thanks to four on-the-spot darkrooms and an Acme-developed machine called the Trans-Ceiver, only 23 minutes elapsed from the time a photographer shot a picture in the hall until Acme transmitted it to a newspaper client’s office anywhere in the U.S. When the Secret Service locked the Convention Hall doors after President Truman arrived, incidentally trapping A.P. and I.N.P. messengers, Acme’s margin of half an hour on the other services jumped temporarily to an hour.

The final accolade from the competition came to stocky, talkative Acme Editor Harold Blumenfeld, when the Hearst papers’ Picture Boss Dick Sarno walked into the basement office, waving a flag of truce. Would it be O.K. if William Randolph Hearst Jr. came down to see how Acme was doing it? A few minutes later, young Hearst and a flock of lesser Hearstlings came in for a guided tour.

But even the basement office did not keep Acme from being scooped on a prize picture of the G.O.P. Convention. When Tom Dewey slipped away to the garden party given by the Pennsylvania Railroad’s M. W. Clement for the leading Republican candidates, the Acme photographer covering Dewey was busy changing his shirt.

The Ambulance Trick. Editor Blumenfeld, 43, has been working for Acme since its founding 25 years ago. He now bosses 250 employees and has 125 regular U.S. clients and a European picture network. Acme, although smaller than A.P., is neck & neck with I.N.P. Like every other picture editor, Blumenfeld has tried many a trick to score a beat. He thinks his best was at the 1928 Gene Tunney-Tom Heeney heavyweight fight at Yankee Stadium. Dressed in a white intern’s coat, Blumenfeld waited outside the stadium gate in an ambulance.

When Acme’s photographer handed Blumenfeld the fight pictures, away went the ambulance, the siren screaming. The pictures were developed on the way and sent to Acme’s clients from a downtown office well ahead of the competition. At the next big fight, six ambulances were parked outside. Recalls Blumenfeld fondly: “We had a regular Roman chariot race down Park Avenue.”

Television looked like a threat to the picture services, if a distant one. As an experiment, the New York Star last week published three pictures of the Democratic Convention photographed in Manhattan from a television screen by an ordinary camera (and no flashlights). LIFE also ran similar pictures this week. Acme, the New York Post and the New York Daily News have also taken pictures from television screens. Their results, like the Star’s, have been too fuzzy and distorted to run as news pictures, though no worse than the early wired photos. But television will improve.