Flying Silos

I was in the last days of my army enlistment and because I had told my CO that I wanted to write for a newspaper, I was in the early days of my two-month internship with the San Pedro News-Pilot.

As the story in Hell on Earth relates, it was really a judge at the gates of heaven that wanted me to be a newspaper writer, but who knew. I was doing my best to impress my editor but the truth is I was doing very light feature stories and probably wasn’t going to make a name for myself in the short time allotted.

And then one day something happened. It may have been due to interference from some outside force or it may have just been dumb luck. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between the two. But I stepped outside my apartment on the upper end of 20th Street in San Pedro, looked down at Los Angeles Harbor, and saw a raging fire and columns of smoke coming from the silos that lined the docks.

I returned to my apartment, grabbed my camera and began taking pictures. It could have easily resulted in just a lot of pictures of smoke, just as in Vietnam I took a lot of pictures of treetops; but this time I got lucky.

As I snapped away, I saw through my lens one of the silos explode and go airborne and suddenly, in an instant, I didn’t just have a picture of a fire but now I had an awesome picture of a fire and a silo looking like it had just been launched from Cape Canaveral —one that was easily newsworthy.

I brought it to my editor and they published it, which would have been good enough but then something better happened. The next day he told me that the picture had gone out over the wires and other papers, I seem to remember the Cleveland Daily Plain being one of them, had picked it up.