The K1000 that Survived Being Run Over by a Tank

An incident that made me "Pentax4Life"

By cjfeola in Columns on May 10, 2023

Mark had parked his K1000 on the tread of an M60A3 main battle tank and gone off to goof off, as was his want. This was a mistake. An M60A3 Patton tank weighs 52 tons and when parked is as stable as a building; it is, however, a lot more mobile than any building when it wants to be. And this tank wanted to move. Mark ran for his camera – foolishly – when the treads started rolling, but the K1000 zipped down the tread, over the front – and then under.

It took us a while to dig it out. The lens glass was fractured. Fortunately, it was a Pentax 50mm F/1.7, which came on every camera in those days. We had so many we couldn’t give them away. Literally. Mark put a new lens on, and finished up the shoot.

Surely any camera would have been crushed if a tank ran over it on a paved or even a dirt road. Fortunately for Mark and his K1000, we were US Army photojournalists in the mud and muck of Ft. Stewart, GA, also known as “20 square miles of the Okeefenokee Swamp avoided by anyone with sense.” How swampy was it? On another exercise I photographed a similar tank sunk to the turret in the muck. A second tank was sent to tow it out, and promptly sank next to it. So a tank wrecker was sent in – and sank. Cooler heads then prevailed and put a stop to things before an entire battalion was down there. They ended up waiting until spring ended and the mud dried up some to dig all those tanks out.

Like so much of my life, I accidentally, serendipitously became a photojournalist. I had dropped out of college to work as a newspaper writer, only to have my first editor hand me a Pentax ME and a half-dozen rolls of Tri-X and say “Reporters have to take pictures. We don’t have the money to send two people to cover stories.” My unfinished autobiography, entitled Things I Did While Planning to do Completely Different Things, covers more such events, such as being Banned from the Pacific Rim, teaching at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism before receiving my bachelor’s degree (Note1), and being granted four patents in data architecture, none of which made good use – any use, really – of my major in Theatre or minor in Modern Dance.

Working at that little newspaper I was covering at least 10 stories a week, and cranking a dozen rolls of Tri-X through that ME. That made me want my own camera. I bought an ME Super.

By the time that tank ran over Mark’s K1000 four years later I was saving for a Nikon F3, widely touted as the professionals’ tool of choice during those years. After the tank incident I took that money andbought an MX, which I still have and occasionally shoot. (I still have that ME Super too, actually.) Over the following two decades I shot for newspapers across 18 states and 7 countries in North America and Asia with that MX, 2 LXs and pretty much every lens Pentax ever made.

After that my career wandered off into tech, but the itch to take photos has never left me. I’ve gone digital, of course. These days there’s a K20D, a K-70, several Qs and a Q7 in my camera cabinet alongside the MX and LXs. And on the film side I finally added the camera I wanted forever: a Pentax 6x7!

This is my second stint writing for Pentax Forums. A decade ago I wrote about the Greatest Pentax Lens of All Time tournament – not surprisingly, the FA 77 Limited won. And I still don’t own and have no interest in the K-1 or any other full-frame Pentax. (More on that in the future.)

But there is a brand new Pentax I need to add to my collection, because Too Many Cameras is Still Not Enough: a K3 III Monochrome.

If you’ve ordered a K3iii Monochrome, let us know; we’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. If you have one already…Show Us The Pix!! Either way, or even if you’re just considering it, keep an eye on our K-3 III eBook, which is being updated to cover the Monochrome.

Indeed, the Monochrome brought me back to Pentax Forums. I heard about it, and went to the News and Rumors forums to learn more. Since I usually hang out in the more specific forums, such as the Pentax Q area. I saw Adam's sticky post looking for writers, we got to talking, and...well, here I am!

As always, taking umbrage at me in the comments is alright, too. And, for the record, some of My Best Friends own K1s. Also, there’s no real story behind my break in writing for Pentax Forums; Life Happens, and I went off and dealt with it. Things have settled down again, fortunately. Now I’m back, glad to be here, and hoping I bring some value to the conversation.

Oh, and, I definitely need a K3iii Monochrome. Don’t you?

(Note1: The short version of this story is that Columbia was developing a Computer-Assisted Reporting and Research program, and brought me in to teach techniques I had developed to use spreadsheets to analyze government budgets.)