Helen Gibson

The distance between station roof and train top was accurately measured, and she practiced the jump with the train standing still. The train had to be moving on camera for about a quarter mile and its accelerating velocity was timed to the second. She leapt without hesitation and landed correctly, but the train’s motion made her roll toward the end of the car. She caught hold of an air vent and hung on, dangling over the edge to increase the effect on the screen. She suffered only a few bruises.

"The real difficulty of the stunt lay not in the leap itself; since she had practised this with the train stationary and it clearly presented no difficulties, but in the timing. What such stunts require is an inbuilt awareness of the speed of the moving object. During the course of a leap where a moving object is concerned, the spatial relationship between take-off point and landing point changes. It is quite possible to imagine a leap from a static take-off point on to the roof of a moving train in which the stuntman aims to land halfway along a carriage roof yet in fact-because of the speed of the train-lands in the gap between two carriages. It seems that in such a leap the safest place to aim at is the gap itself At least in that way one can guarantee to miss it. Helen Gibson had this sensitivity to spatial relationships between objects in motion, but it is certainly not a gift shared by all stuntmen." Read Less

She worked constantly stunt doubling and in uncredited or bit parts. As she had in her heyday, Helen became a featured guest at benefit rodeos and events such as the Annual Santa Barbara Horse Show. Read Less