by Dick Houston

I’m often asked what led me to go to Africa to operate safaris, and years later create Elefence International with its Founder, Bruce Lowe of Taft Law in Cleveland.

The story all started in an Ohio hometown theatre —which I wrote about decades later for a SMITHSONIAN magazine feature as follows in the intro…

“When I was a kid in Ashtabula, Ohio in the 1950s, Hollywood was churning out one African movie after another — everything from King Solomon’s Mines and The African Queen to Mogambo and The Roots of Heaven. My own favorite adventure films in those days were reruns of creaky documentaries about Africa that had been produced in the 1920s and 30s by Martin and Osa Johnson, a swashbuckling husband and wife team from Kansas. The Johnsons’ storylines were episodic, but their film formula was irresistible: mount an elaborate safari, improvise various situations as you go along and film them on the spot….”

Decades later the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum in Kansas assigned me the task of finding and identifying the lost films of the Johnsons stored in an old vault at the Library of Congress.

The following video shows some of the lost footage now brought to light for the first time.

https://www.haleyjackson.com/wingsovertanzania/

Thanks for reading and watching.

Dick Houston
President of Elefence International. Website: elefence.org

dhoustonelefence@yahoo.com

( Dick is an Honorary Trustee of the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum,
Chanute, Kansas )

Note: Conrad Froehlich, the Director of the Museum, is an Honorary Trustee of Elefence International. Museum website: safarimuseum.com