I am troubled that Osa and Martin are largely ignored today. Talk about pioneers!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-U_5Q4CHlM

Very interesting couple. I read Osa's book, I Married Adventure a while back. Just started another book she wrote, Four Years in Paradise, about four years she and Martin spent at Lake Paradise near Mount Marsabit in Kenya. They were incredible adventurers. Their trips to the South Pacific islands, sailing with Jack London, Africa. Pretty amazing for a couple of kids from Kansas.

If you find yourself in Chanute, KS, be sure and visit the Johnson Safari Museum, well worth it:
http://www.safarimuseum.com/

They also did a few movies of the travel log type as well as having a circus show. They were self taught for the most part and she was an underage gal at the beginning. I enjoyed their movies and her books.

+1 on the museum in Kansas. Well worth the stop. While there I was able to pick up a DVD collection in the gift shop of their old African movies. Quite the couple.

Has been a ongoing thread on the Johnsons over on the NE site
http://forums.nitroexpress.com...&page=0&fpart=1&vc=1

m4220

I bought their DVDs on amazon. They are pretty much unwatchable, the quality is so low. They have not been remastered, and probably never will.

Compared to the footage of Bob Ruark's safari sold on Safari Press they are absolute shit.

Good thing is Amazon has them dirt cheap.

BWW: Thgat's a darned shame. I'll bet they could be cleaned up considerably using the current digital technologies, if someone had an incentive.

I am happy to have a copy of her famous 9.3x62 barrel going on a Mauser as we speak.

I wonder if Bob Faucett, a Houstonian who used to post on AR, still has Osa's 9.3x62?

I think he plans to be buried with that rifle.

The books about her and her husband and pretty good. Worth the effort to get them and read them. They were true entrepenuers.

Entrepreneurs, yes, but also hypocrites who often libeled other hunters (except for their patron/$$ponsor George Eastman of Kodak fame).

Another AR member recently reminded me that she jabbed a Kenyan game warden in her "I Married Adventure" by writing "He had a brusqueness of manner and we saw it grew out of a downright exasperation with the so-called big game hunters who came, in increasing numbers, to fatten their egos with trophies, no matter how obtained, and whose lust to kill would in time become a menace to African wild life."

In the same book, she also wrote "On our way back to Nairobi we had rare luck in securing some fine pictures of eland . . . which fast is disappearing under the gun of the ruthless hunter."

There were few television sets in the early 1950s in Yuma, where I grew up, but I remember watching her "The Big Game Hunt" nature-faker programs at the home of a friend in San Francisco. Even as a teenager with zero African experience, I questioned how she got so many animals to charge so could kill them mere feet from Martin's camera.

Bill Quimby

I'm with Mr. Quimby on this--I noticed several derogatory comments about safari hunters in "I Married Adventure," and after I finished the book (skimming the last few chapters in disgust) I dropped it off at our local Goodwill store, rather than add it to my rather small collection of Africana.

I guess Osa improved her shooting acumen; in the first of their Africa safaris, neither she nor Martin could hit squat.

Did not know she "had it both ways."