WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHY: RICHARD TRUESDELL
Being an automotive photojournalist is not normally seen as a dangerous occupation, but in some cases it can be. In a career that has spanned over 25 years, three times I have been hit or run over by cars.
First, I will admit to being something of a daredevil. In 1988, I ticked off an item on my personal bucket list. I skied the trail that was used for the Olympic downhill at Whiteface Mountain at Lake Placid, New York. In doing so, I caught an edge and took a very painful, high-speed spill. I was 34 at the time, and while I was bruised, the injury didn’t seem to be significant.
In 2004, while in Normandy covering the festivities surrounding the 60th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, I got hit by a car. Well, I actually ran into a speeding car. While President Bush was speaking at the American Cemetery at La Cambe overlooking Omaha Beach, I was photographing graves elsewhere. I was specifically looking for a grave of an unknown German solider who fell on June 6 at the nearby German Cemetery (which was the original site of the American Cemetery in Normandy) for the feature I was producing. I had parked my Jeep across the road from the entrance, and I went back to retrieve a different lens. In running back to the cemetery and not looking, I sprinted into a speeding Peugeot. My belt bucket left a scratch in the Peugeot’s passenger-side front fender and my right arm impacted the windscreen, leaving me with painful lacerations before going into shock. Thankfully, I survived.
In 2009, when crouching down at dusk in a driveway to take a 200mm shot of a new Corvette for the launch of my magazine, Chevy Enthusiast, I was struck from behind by a Toyota Solara coupe. This resulted in the destruction of my very expensive Nikon 28-200mm zoom lens, along with the separation of my right shoulder. Ouch!
And this past February, the 16th to be exact, I managed to run myself over. The circumstances were quite careless. The neutral safety switch on my Jeep Grand Cherokee was bad. I had tried replacing it and the attendant connector, without success. To work around this temporarily, I ran a wire from the starter so that I could the jump from the battery. This works fine as long as the car is in park or neutral. Apparently I carelessly left the car in gear, so when I touched the wire to the battery, standing in front of the car, my Jeep ran me over.
This was serious. I went underneath. Had my Grand Cherokee been four-wheel drive, its front differential would have likely killed me. I was non-responsive at the scene until the EMTs arrived 15 minutes later. I did suffer five fractured vertebrae, a fractured right ankle, multiple bruises and contusions, and a back full of road rash. I spent two weeks in the hospital, then 14 weeks in rehab, learning to walk again. During that recuperation, when an MRI was taken of my back, evidence showed a previous fracture. Was it Whiteface in 1988, Normandy in 2004, or California in 2009? I’ll never know.
On July 4, I returned to work. The occasion? To shoot what is possibly the finest Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Roadster on the planet for Classic Mercedes magazine.. While I planned to shoot the car sitting in my four-wheel walker, midway during the shoot, I stood up and without thinking, instinctively started shooting. My best friend and co-author of three books with me, took a single shot, showing me standing, camera in hand.
It felt great. In the future, I plan to be more careful.
