Fifty-Four years ago this month I was walking around downtown San Francisco on one of my photo expeditions and came upon a crowd of people gathered around some police vehicles, a “man lift” truck, and some large bright spot lights. I made frequent photo expeditions to downtown SF since I was in the US Navy and stationed on Treasure Island for a year.
As it tured out, they were filming the jumper scene from the movie, Dirty Harry, which starred Clint Eastwood as Detective Harry Callahan. In this scene Callahan was supposed to prevent a suicidal guy on the building from jumping.
If you look closely at the video below, you can see me in the crowd below with my Minolta SRT-101 pointing up at the Panavision camera high over head. Haha! Just kidding! The crowd where I was standing was mostly unlit, but I did get some pictures.
I took 36 shots spread across two rolls of film, one Tri-X and the other Plus-X. The remaining frames look to be street photography of pretty girls (I was 19 at the time). The two frames shown below are both from the Tri-X roll. I only printed a few of them. Since the best recreational darkroom facilities available to service members were at the Presidio Army Base, that’s where I went to develop film and print pictures. I added a description on the back of a few of the prints and sent them home to my family in Milwaukee.
About the same time, they were also filming “The Organization” with Sydney Poirtier. It was during the construction of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) System.
In the process of sifting through some of my boxes of prints, I have come across many pictures that I had forgotten about. For example, I have editorial photos from a 1989 F4 tornado disaster, a 1993 KKK rally, and a 2010 Gay Pride parade, all in Huntsville, Alabama, a small plane crash in Wisconsin, and a TWA airplane hijacking in Keflavik, Iceland. But, I also have about 40 trillion pictures of my dogs (LOL!).