On May 3rd, 1953, Walter and Virginia Schau decided to take her parents out for a day of fishing. Virginia Schau brought her Brownie camera although she said later told a reporter: “I’m the kind of person who always takes a camera on a trip and never takes a picture.”
The Schaus were driving on a two-lane road approaching the Pit River Bridge north of the town of Redding, California behind a semitrailer carrying fruits and vegetables. As the truck started over the bridge, the truck’s steering failed causing the truck to crash through the bridge’s steel railing.
The cab, with the driver and one other passenger trapped inside, dangled precariously off the bridge forty feet above the Sacramento River. The rear wheels of the cab were jammed between the side of the bridge and the trailer, which had miraculously remained on the bridge. Walter Schau, and the driver behind him, found a length of rope and with the help of other motorists, attempted to rescue the two men from the dangling cab. Virginia Schau grabbed her Brownie camera and “ran out to a knoll on the right which was directly opposite to where the cab of the truck dangled in the air.”
Walter Schau, hanging by his ankles, was able to lower the rope to the driver, who grabbed onto it and was pulled up by Schau, McLaren and others. The other man remained in the cab, semi-conscious, and when the cab caught fire, Walter Schau had to climb down and pull Baum out, before the cab, fully ablaze, fell into the Sacramento River. While the rescue operations were going on, Virginia Schau, from her vantage point, was able to get off two pictures, using the last two exposures in her camera.
Later, Schau’s father reminded Virginia of the Sacramento Bee’s weekly photo contest. She submitted the photograph, won the contest–and ten dollars–and the photograph was picked up by the Associated Press and distributed globally. Almost a year to the day later, Virginia Schau was “flabbergasted” to hear that her picture of the rescue had won the 1954 Pulitzer Prize for Photography.