[Leica] A Photographer gone

["\(SonC\) Sonny Carter" <sonc@sonc.com>]

This guy inspired me to go into News Photography.\
Sonny

News photographer McAneny dead at 79
John Andrew Prime / The Times
Posted on April 8, 2002

Veteran Shreveport film and video photographer and journalist J. Frank
McAneny died early Sunday at Summit Hospital after a lengthy illness. He was
79.

Up until the last few years, it would be hard to mention a notable news
event at which the sight of McAneny's antenna-bristling collection of
station wagons and sedans was not a common sight - often arriving on scene
with the first police or emergency vehicles and usually well before other
media.

"The picture comes first, and I'm going to get it," McAneny said in a 1987
photo profile in The Times. "The danger, your clothes, the equipment is
secondary. That's what you're out there for, to capture what's happening. If
you're not going to get there quick, why even go?"

Craggy and fast-moving, he traveled with a collection of police radios,
cameras and bright lights he sometimes used to light crime scenes for area
police. For many years, until declining health intervened, he slept daytimes
and worked night when accidents and crime occurred, sleeping with a police
scanner by his bed.

"He loved photography," said veteran videographer Semmie Buffin, who first
worked with McAneny at Channel 12 27 years ago. "He lived, he ate, he
breathed it. Another thing, he was dedicated. I found a friend in J. Frank
and someone who loved his work and was really challenging to work with."

In his six-decade career, McAneny took pictures for The Times and the
now-defunct Shreveport Journal, for the local ABC and CBS affiliates, and
upon demand for national publications. His national credits ranged from Life
Magazine to the old Movie-Tone News newsreels, which used riveting footage
he shot of the 1954 murder of then-Shreveport Police Chief E.G. Huckaby
during a shootout with a fugitive.

"He wanted to do news more than anything else in this world, and he wanted
to do it well," said longtime friend and competitor Langston McEachern,
now-retired photo chief for The Times. "He always wanted to be the first
there."

McEachern, who had known McAneny since just after World War II, recalled
that "J. Frank had a little speaker under his pillow, so he could hear the
police scanner. We all had families, but he didn't, so he'd wake up and go
after something when it happened."

McAneny was fearless. Once he stood in the path of a burning B-29 bomber
that crashed short of the Barksdale Air Force Base runway, standing and
shooting so close to the wreckage that he was splattered with burning fuel.
He also had at least one crashing stock car flip over him at a dangerous
raceway turn, and was once caught in a forest fire.

McAneny took young reporters and photographers under his wing. At least one
reporter who accepted McAneny's offer of a short hop from one side of a
large crime scene to another found himself, to his dismay, off on a
bone-ratting ride to an East Texas fire or regional mishap after the crackle
of a police-scanner call commanded McAneny's attention.

"I rode with J. Frank once down to Dee's to get film, and swore I'd never
get back into a car with him again," Buffin said. "My feet went through the
floorboard trying to brake on the passenger side. He drove with one one foot
on the accelerator and the other on the brake, at all times."

McAneny was an avid collector of military and historical items, and as a
member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans - he had ancestors who fought for
both the North and the South - he was a familiar sight at battle
re-enactments. A potent "carbide cannon" he used at dedications and other
such events set off downtown car and office alarms on more than one
occasion. He amassed a large collection of Civil War artifacts and labored
in his last years to find a proper home for them.

"He was a legend and he left a legacy that this city will never be able to
erase," Buffin said. "He drove around with a metal detector in his car, and
every Sunday he would go down to Mansfield and look for (battle) artifacts.
That was what made McAneny click. That and photography."



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