Volume 4 - No. One - Winter 2009

Volume Four, Number One - Winter 2009

Help us fund sustainable commerce and at the same time help vets overcome their Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome! This is a rare opportunity to own an original AC Pillsbury d'orotone with letter of provenance. This particular d'orotone of Lake Tenaya in Yosemite, was matted by AC himself and given to his son, Dr. Arthur F. Pillsbury, for Christmas in 1941. The reserve price is $2,000. Send your offer to: winkey@acpillsburyfoundation.org now. Watch for a new line of d'orotones that will also help us fund what America needs!

The image is bright and sharp, the product of a new process AC never sold commercially.

Under-Sea Photography

Just one adventure of a life time.

He sailed to Pago-Pago in 1930 for the purpose of filming the first underwater motion picture. With him he took two cameras sealed in brass waterproof boxes he had designed at home in Oakland, California. A mechanical engineer, Arthur C. Pillsbury built his equipment in his own shop. In his book, Picturing Miracles of Plant and Animal Life, Pillsbury' provided instructions on how to do the same, building your own kit or having it made for you from his designs. He included estimates for cost along with materials. He advised the reader to learn how to swim, pointing out that this was a good idea if your intention was to photograph the residents and landscapes under the ocean.

With lapse-time photography for plants, the microscopic camera, and the X-Ray motion picture camera under his belt he was looking for more parts of the world to reveal to human eyes and minds. As audiences listened to his lectures on worlds previously unknown few, perhaps, reflected on the fact that the images they were seeing were changing the world in which they lived. But that was happening.

In Pago-Pago Arthur C. Pillsbury found water clear enough to allow him to photograph the world of living creatures and landscapes that few people had ever seen. The first underwater motion picture was produced.

The trip had taken enormous preparations in work and study. Pillsbury wrote in his book, “icturing Miracles of Plant and Animal Life,“The cameras must be protected from salt water, inside a waterproof metal box and still allow me to do all the things necessary, so I designed brass boxes for two motion, and one still, cameras and then a graphite-lined double-trapped stuffing box that was water-tight and still allowed me to crank the cameras, focus them, set the shutter, make the exposure and handle them almost as well from the outside of the brass box as I could no land.”

The book was, among other things, an instruction manual in how to build your own camera. It provided instructions on how each camera, lapse-time, microscopic motion picture, X-Ray and Underwater, was built, just in case you wanted to do it yourself.

The underwater cameras and breathing equipment were heavy on land, light in the water, one camera weighing 170 Lbs on land and only about 30 pounds when submerged.

The cameras were tested in advance, ensuring that the pictures made through the optical glass windows would work. Then came the task of readying his own gear.

Buying a second hand helmet he found it was so heavy he could not lift it an put it on his shoulders unaided. No matter. He knew that once underwater it would be more like wearing a hat, he said. The air pump, the air lines, film, all parts and replacements must be accounted for, packed, and carried with him. When the hardware store in three weeks away you can't mosey down there for the part you need. Pago-Pago was very primitive.

Arriving in Pago-Pago, Pillsbury chose the location for his film, considering the issue of coral that was attractive while avoiding the hazards the coral presented to bodily parts. Humm, he wrote walking across the coral strewn area, I will wear tennis shoes while exploring my filming sites. Having never dived before he knew he must learn that new skill rapidly if he was to return home with the film he wanted for his lecture tour.

No floating experience was involved. The 'boys' dropped him off the side of the boat and he landed in the sandy bottom below, spending some time clearing out his glasses so he could see. Then, to work. The sights were glorious.

“I soon began to enjoy the work very much and would stay down two of three hours till I had used all my film or taken all the good locations within reach of my hose and life line. Reaching the bottom I would pick up a tripod, metal to weight it, and a piece of ten-foot gas pipe for a cane and measuring rod, walk around till I found just the view I wanted-good coral, lots of fish and the right light, set up the tripod, measure the distance carefully, go back to get the camera, having to remember the direction as I could not see it even in that clear water if it was over twenty-five feet away, but I knew it was under the launch,and I could see her in the “ceiling” above me.”

“Fish were everywhere, swimming all around me, peeking into the window of my helmet, wondering perhaps what sort of new kind of fish I was. They were very tame, I could almost touch then, all colors-blue, yellow, black, red, even the delicate orchid and dater shades and so many combinations it was impossible to describe them.”

Pillsbury learned how to dive, use his camera, took notes for his lectures, completing his work in just few weeks. Learning to focus his camera underwater was handled efficiently, with on the spot testing showing him how to ensure his films would be sharp.

Walking in the forest of coral higher than his head he avoided the dark caves both because they could hold danger and because he could not photograph their contents in any case.

Encountering giant clams he said, “The giant clams thirty inches in diameter, large enough to weigh almost a ton, could crush the large bones of your leg if they close on it. I saw only one of these huge fellows and it would have taken a derrick to pull him loose and raise him into the boat”

Also present was the threat of sharks, which the native boys who stayed in the boat, knew from experience to watch for. Jelly fishes were also dreaded by the natives, some of these having tendrils ten feet long and poisonous.

“Still, with ordinary care there is no more danger than crossing a busy city street dodging one of “Henry's sharks,” and others of the species.” In this way Pillsbury tipped his hat to Ford.

In the end Pillsbury spent only ten days getting his films. It was enough. America was amazed that next year with scenes that lite their imaginations, leaving them wanting to know more about the world beneath the sea.

Few people visited Pago-Pago then. Aside from Navy personnel few people from the outside saw the glories of the islands. Now, thousands saw its underwater beauties and its people as Pillsbury toured America bringing the images and stories of their world to ordinary people.

“Almost no tourists come on account of the lack of hotels. Steamers southbound from San Francisco arrie with mail every three weeks and that is the grand market day for the natives. They gather in the Malai, a level grass-covered place in the village, and have their wares on sale-all sorts of things to tempt the tourist, tapa, kava bowls, Hula skirts, shells, coral, native fruit, model boats, war clubs, home-made jewelry, etc. It makes a colorful display, even the humble hen's eggs find a lace in this market place.”

Pillsbury and his wife eagerly bought Alofas, gifts, for their families at home in California. The holidays were coming, always a warm family event for all of them.

As they were leaving Pillsbury noticed the boy who had watched for sharks while he was filming many feet below the launch. Realizing he had forgotten to say goodby he hastened shore to say his farewell, giving him a small gift of thanks. “At the same moment he reached down, picked up a small kava bowl, passed it to me and said, “May God be with you on your journey home and ever afterwards. I trust you wish the same for me.” It took my breath away. I think it was the first time I had heard him speak English as he talked to Happy, my head boy who handled the life lines, in his native Samoan language.”

Pillsbury was both surprised and delighted. He had long realized that people were all more alike than different. With Happy Pillsbury had had long talks on conditions in the Islands, comparing them to California. Happy had wanted more education that the local schools could provide. A correspondence was taken up only to end with the beginning of World War II.

The images that Arthur C. Pillsbury took in Pago-Pago were to amaze minds. Those taken under the sea enlarged our knowledge, opening doors previously shut. The photos you see here show the other story of Pago-Pago, the story of its beauty and the people AC came to know well during those weeks. When the ship steamed into San Francisco the lecture on Life in and Under the South Seas was ready to present to America.

Help us bring the story of Arthur C. Pillsbury to the world by purchasing a reproduction of one of these these photos, produced for the family that Christmas as d'orotones. Give one to someone you love, a gift that gives in 360 degrees of connection. Visit the Store to see the image now available.

Volume 3, No. 1 - Summer 2008

Arthur C. Pillsbury - You See The World Through His Eyes

No matter where you live today you see the world through the eyes of a man of whom you are probably unaware. Over a period of half a lifetime Arthur C. Pillsbury designed and built the cameras that changed our beliefs about nature and science.

Pillsbury's career would lay the groundwork for the use of photography as we know it today. Seeing is understanding. Seeing connects us with immediacy and power, providing both the medium for art and for all human innovation.

The cameras invented by Arthur C. Pillsbury remain with us. Each was conceived and built to provide the means for Pillsbury to solve a problem he confronted and was determined to solve. While still in college he considered how to widen the frame of a lens to produce a more expansive image. He solved the problem by designing and building the first circuit panorama camera. With that camera he chronicled the opening of the mining fields in the Yukon, explored the entire West Coast, and recorded the San Francisco Earthquake from the first day on. The images captured were not always beautiful, but they were always true to life. Images have continued to provide us with needed insights through wars, tragedies, and celebrations. Photojournalism, just one application of the technology of photography, has changed lives and our national direction.

In 1910, realizing that the number of species of wild flowers in the meadow near his studio in Yosemite were decreasing; Pillsbury built a camera that would capture the growth progression of flowering plants so that the plants themselves could tell their own story. Today all of us are familiar with the the images of a flower lifting its face to the sun in a dance-like motion. Flowers in motion, captured by time lapse photography grant us entirely different perspective on their life cycle and the need to preserve them.

Ever the pioneer and pushing the technological limits of photography of his day, on May 17, 1919, Pillsbury took the first aerial photos of Yosemite. This new view of the Yosemite valley provided perspective on the park unknown until his film was made. He used short films on nature to teach environmentalist themes. His films began to be shown in movie theaters. He was the first film documentarian that took environmentalism from the classroom to people.

In 1927, in a lab loaned to him by UC Berkeley, Pillsbury build a microscopic motion picture camera. His images stunned the scientists of the day. They had spent their careers studying dead samples under their microscopes. With Pillsbury's new camera living samples could projected on a screen in a lecture hall. The ability to capture events with the microscopic motion picture camera has created explosive waves of discovery in every field of science.

Pillsbury's motion picture technology caught the attention of leaders from around the world who wanted to bring his technology and his way to impart information to their nations. He found himself awash with invitations to present his perspective on nature as a living, growing changing system of plants and animals interacting with the environment. By 1930 Pillsbury invented the X-ray motion picture and underwater motion picture cameras. The focus of his life's work was connecting you to the worlds we could not see without the extension of human vision made possible through his photographic innovations.

Pillsbury's cameras were not patented. He believed that his inventions could be improved upon by those who were inclined to improve them. His mission was not patenting inventions but instead creating new photographic technology to carry on his work. Although an idealist Pillsbury did patent his mass production machine for photo post cards in 1922. The sole patent was intended to provide resources to fund work that would follow. As for cameras he provided them as gifts for our use and development. He wanted them to be available to everyone. To that end he wrote a book, “Picturing Miracles of Plant and Animal Life,” that explained in each case how the camera used were built so others could do the same.

The world has used his work lavishly. His earliest educational films, then produced for schools at all levels, were used worldwide. He created new awareness of the natural world; His photographs of people connect you to the warmth and humanity of the man behind the camera, reflected in the faces of those who see images remain for us to see. His legacy remains with us through those images and also through our own minds and eyes as we see the world today. His images stay with you because for Arthur C. Pillsbury people remained in the frame.

In every part of our lives photography touches us, changes us, informs, and increases our awareness of our world. Arthur C. Pillsbury was one of the first photographic pioneers beckoning us on with images and insights. But he was more than that as you will discover for yourself as you understand his life's work.

From “Miracles of Plant and Animal Life” by Arthur C. Pillsbury

“Beauty, Form, and Color, the Rhythm of movement, express art everywhere. The story of a bud opening, a leaf unfolding, a seed germinating, all the various steps of its life struggle for perpetuation, is as interesting and poignant as one's own life's happenings. Step by step the lens has registered on a sensitive film of a lapse-time, motor-driven motion camera, recording in that way in a comparatively few seconds life efforts that may take days or even weeks to happen.....

...Man looks at a flower in passing: the eye would soon tire in trying to watch the growth or change of position, but the lapse-time camera, running at a speed to record in the time we have to see it, registers every change of position day and night with a tireless lens eye, and all from the same chosen position, writing on the film what happens in lines, expressing position, growth and color until finally death, or better call it, when its parts have fulfilled their life's duty, passing onto another form.”

Life Time Accomplishments

• 1895 – Invents specimen slicer for microscope at Stanford

• 1895 - Photographs first Rush at Stanford

First visits Yosemite via bicycle from Palo Alto

• 1896 - Invents circuit panoramic camera, as senior project at Stanford.

• 1897 - Leaves for Alaska to chronicle Gold Rush

Shipwrecked and rescues himself.

• Trip from the headwaters of Yukon River to sea in a canoe.

• 1903 - Begins work as photographer in San Francisco

• 1906 - Photographs Earthquake, distributes world-wide.

Buys a studio in Yosemite.

Photographs the Missions of California and sites of interest through out the state.

• 1910 - Aerial photographs of rebuilding, runaway balloon.

Balloon breaks free. He is reported dead.

Films first nature movie, shows it at The Studio of the Three Arrows in Yosemite.

• 1911 - Begins work on lapse-time studies on flowers

• 1912 – Builds and films the first lapse-time movie of a flower blooming.

Stops the cutting of the wildflowers in the meadows of Yosemite by persuasion.

• 1921 - First aerial motion pictures of Yosemite.

• 1922 – Patents the first mass production unit for photo postcards.

• 1924 - First color motion picture, produced for his lecture series.

• 1927 – Builds the first microscopic motion picture camera in a borrowed lab at UC Berkeley. Dedicates it to science.

• 1929 - Builds the first X-ray motion picture camera.

Makes the first movie using the X-ray motion picture camera.

• 1930 - First underwater motion picture

• 1935 – Photographed the process of hydroponics carried out by Professor Gericke at Berkeley

• 1942 - Documents process of osmosis in plants.

Find some of his images at:

http://www.cafepress.com/pillsburypicco/

acpillsburyhome.org

pillsburypicturecompany.com

Introducing the Arthur C. Pillsbury Gallery! Look for it at photobiz.com, with lots of photos and a new beginning.

Spring 2006 Volume 2 Number 1

In this issue: Converting disaster to environmental progress

The First Nature Movies: Studio of the Three Arrows

Things that will be happening

Acquire a piece of history

You can purchase a remastered copy of the original of this picture. For information contact us at:

winkey@acpillsburyfoundation.org

The Centennial of the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire

Converting disaster to environmental progress

That anniversary of the Quake and Fire that completely changed San Francisco passed last April 18^th with parties and commemorations. Ancient survivors of the event, delighted to be lifted from lives of obscurity, waxed eloquent in the spotlight. However, although the reasons that the Quake and subsequent Fire are now well known and documented very little was said about those root causes.

For Arthur C. Pillsbury the Earthquake and its aftermath was life changing.

“The morning of April 18th was a memorable one. The earth quake shook me out of bed. It did some light damage to the house. I grabbed my cameras and started for San Francisco. Fortunately I had saved my press badge when I left the Examiner and knowing all the police in the city I could go everywhere. That Wednesday I covered the entire city, making 5 X 7 Graflex views and panoramas of the burning city. ”

On that first day Pillsbury shot over 70 snap shots and two panoramas, one from the top of the Merchants Exchange Building covering the wholesale section just at noon, and one from the top of the St. Francis Hotel showing almost the entire city in flames.

It was these photos that went out to newspapers all over the world because the destructive might of the Earthquake and Fire had shattered the other facilities that photographers used to develop their film. At the Pillsbury home in Oakland there was running water. Faced with the problem of continuing supplies, Pillsbury sent buyers out to towns as far as 500 miles away to meet the demand for the images. Over the next weeks prints from a single negative of one of the panoramas taken that first day would bring in from $500.00 to $700.00 a day. The photos would also appear in the new San Francisco Magazine, the lay out of images catching the despair and desolation coming on the heels of the erupting inferno.

The panorama negatives measured 44 inches in length and could be blown up to lengths greater than nine feet, showing incredible detail.

At the end of the first day, Pillsbury left his panorama camera, a large and unwieldy mechanism, in the cloak room of the St. Francis Hotel and that night and it was consumed along with the hotel. The film had gone with him, tucked in the pocket of his jacket. The shots taken with the Graflax camera included a shot of the Palace and Grand Hotels coming down, drenched in flame, caught as it seemed to dissolve before your eyes. He reported in his autobiography that the heat was so intense that while taking the picture it scorched the lens making the balsum run and so spoiling the photo. The bellows soon dropped to pieces, he said.

Included in the hundreds of images made by Pillsbury over the next few weeks were scenes filled with destruction, shock, and courage, showing the City as it continued to burn and the people as they struggled to survive and then began the long, slow, painful process of rebuilding. While taking photos and following the course of the struggle to stop the fire Pillsbury also found time to ensure that friends and acquaintances were safe. Some he sent on to his home in Oakland, where many camped out for weeks afterwards. Among these was the woman he would marry. Dragging the single trunk they had been able to save from her home in San Francisco to the ferry proved to be a one way trip for the lady. The two were married six weeks later in a small ceremony attended by both families from several parts of California.

While San Francisco survived many residents did not; some families were never reunited and never learned the fate of their loved ones. Ranging all over the City, and never far from the most intense action, Pillsbury saw acts of violence perpetrated by the military brought in to provide security. He was the incompetence of those entrusted to use dynamite to create fire breaks, instead spreading the conflagration. Those hours impacted everyone who lived through them; each carried away with them into the remainder of their lives lessons learned about human nature and the nature of the universe.

Life had taught a lesson; what we believe is solid and to be relied on can change in the blink of a moment. For Arthur C. Pillsbury it had been a real learning experience.

The First Nature Movies: Studio of the Three Arrows

Arthur C. Pillsbury had begun showing nature films, the first ever made, in 1909, advertising them on post cards then given away at such locations as El Portal. Those first films showed the wonders of Yosemite, and the wind moving through the seas of grasses that filled the meadows with Half Dome and Yosemite's other wonders in the background.

The films serves as the visual aids for the narrative Pillsbury provided. He had long been fascinated by the whole of nature. As a young boy growing up in Auburn, California, he had raised exotic chickens, cross breeding them and keeping charts on the resulting off spring while selling eggs and breeding stock to friends and neighbors. The family had come to Auburn from Brooklyn, New York, where they had lived while Arthur's mother, Harriet Foster Pillsbury, completed her education as a physician at the Women's Infirmary in what is not the Village.

Before that they had lived first in Medford, MA where Arthur was born, the last of four children, and second son. It was in the fields around Medford and during the family's trips to the Old Homestead in Sandown, New Hampshire, that Arthur first began studying botany when he was very young.

The Old Homestead had stood at the edge of Sandown since the towns inception in 1756. Benjamin Pillsbury had been born in Amesbury, MA, eldest son to Caleb Pillsbury and chosen to set off for what was then the wilderness. The Pillsbury Homestead included a lake, known now as Angle Pond but then as the Angly to the family. Here, in the old white house raised by Benjamin, Arthur ranged over the Angly and studied the plants native to the area. The old house was full of books by early naturalists that had been used by generations of the family. So the wild flowers of Yosemite became another page in his life long love of nature, so sharing that knowledge with others came naturally to him.

He understood that most people were not blessed with a family who took such knowledge for granted extended and so the lectures on the world of nature found in Yosemite combined his own interests; nature and making a living in a place that had fascinated him since his first trip there in 1895.

Each year more films were added to his library so that the same films need not be shown but could be varied.

Soon after his purchase of the Studio of the Three Arrows Pillsbury noticed something. The meadows were changing. At that point in time the meadows were being mowed to provide fodder for the horses oforthe Cavalry, who were still in Yosemite as its caretakers and stewards.

Each year Pillsbury noticed that the number of species of flowers in those meadows was diminishing. If Muir had been focusing on the issue of the preservation of these fragile life forms he would have begun a petition campaign to Congress. But Muir was then completely focused on stopping the building of a dam in the Hetch Hetchy. The wild flowers had no protector. So Pillsbury undertook to let the wild flowers speak for themselves.

In 1912 he invented the first lapse-time motion picture camera calibrated to show the dance of a wild flower as it raises its head to the sun. He first showed this to those in charge of the cutting. The cutting stopped without a single petition being signed. Then the Studio of the Three Arrows airy porch became the first theater in the world where the public would see wild flowers in their own time and at their own speed.

The Studio of the Three Arrows was located in front of the Yosemite Chapel and slightly towards Sentinel Bridge until 1924 when Pillsbury moved to the new location now known as Yosemite Village.

Upcoming Events:

Thanks to Marilynn Guske for her sharing of Pillsbury postcards!

Thanks to The summer newsletter will include the article on Florance, the great-aunt of Kathy Stewart. Florance taught in Alhambra, CA and knew the Pillsburys at Berkeley where she went to school in the 19teens.

Thanks to Jeanette Hyden for the story of "THE ROAD WINDS OUT INTO THE SUNSHINE" photograph that has been in her family for so long and to her daughter for photographing it so that we could see the jpeg.

Please continue to send in your stories about your Pillsbury Photo Experiences!

Melinda Pillsbury-Foster

Winter 2005 Volume 1 Number 4

Editor: Melinda Pillsbury-Foster

Website: www.acpillsburyfoundation.co

online store: http://www.cafepress.com/pillsburypicco

In this issue:

Inside Story Post Cards

The Tour of Old Village

Insight from scans sent! Thanks to Marilynn Guske

Inside Story Post Cards: Revisiting an old friend with new life.

Postcards for the 21^st Century

From the outside an Inside Story Post Card looks much like one of those post cards produced in huge numbers by the Pillsbury Picture Company, Inc. through most of the first part of the Twentieth Century. There is a photo on the front and the back includes the time honored graphic of the Wawona Tree. Now you can see the small car coming through the tree – and if you eyes were truly great you might be able to see the smile on the face of the driver, who is Arthur F. Pillsbury, the youngest son of AC.

But something new has been added to this generation of post cards.

The Inside Story ties the image to the stories the image can't tell you about itself. The Post Card opens up to reveal a place that allows you to write a brief message, though less brief that the space provided by the previous cards. But when you flip up that page you find the short stories that provides you with the inside story on the front photo along with other photos, where we could fit one in.

The idea for the Inside Story Post Card was born when I was visiting Patrick Horsbrugh, the originator of Environics, and an early environmentalist who lives in South Bend, Indiana. I offered Patrick a copy of one of the many Pillsbury images the Pillsbury Picture Company is reissuing but instead Patrick wanted something smaller but deeper. He had enjoyed hearing about the picture and he wanted to remember the stories I had told him.

Patrick is now in the process of donating much of his extensive collection of art and books to institutions and so he did not want another print to take up space on his walls, he wanted the stories I had told him about one image he had lingered over after breakfast one morning. I offered him a book, Tour of Old Yosemite, that has most of those stories written down.. Too much to store, he said, looking at me in the expectation I would find a solution, and just the right solution.

The image Patrick had enjoyed so much was the close up of a Snow Plant taken in 1910 in Yosemite and tinted for use as a specimen card. The stories told that morning linked the image to the death of President Warren G. Harding, marketing, my father, and AC's continuing attempts at preservation. Patrick wanted to be able to share the stories with his friends just as I had relayed them to him. So I left South Bend thinking about how to accomplish that while not adding to the burden of things Patrick was giving away.

The idea came to me while inventorying postcards for the AC Pillsbury Archives. I started playing with two pieces of paper and winnowed it down to one, using every possible surface. The card as I designed it also gave me a way to solve some other problems that had been exercising my mind.

Everyone of us has had the sad and exasperating experience of peering at old photos, including post cards, and wishing we knew the stories behind the photos. A picture is worth a thousands words but it will not tell you the name of the people smiling into the camera or what happened to the little girl with the sad look on her face. That is where Inside Story Post Cards come in. In this way we can include many more stories and so deepen our understanding of history.

History, properly understood, is countless threads of story that weave together into complex and interesting patterns. But in real life most of those threads are ignored; the only ones visible to us are those that most of us already know. So we all know about George Washington crossing the Delaware but few know that the young man who was left holding his horse died of exposure and the statues of a young black man that once stood in front of houses were originally a memorial to him that marked safe houses on the Underground Railroad. Later generations took these statues to be a racist slur, the former associations lost in time. http://www.loudounhistory.org/history/underground-railroad-jockey-statues.htm

George Washington was, to say the least, a well known public figure. Stories can tie us together in unexpected ways. They can explain things we did not even know we cared about.

And history is all of the stories, not just a few. The proliferation of historical societies across the country have worked at making local history live for new generations and Inside Story Post Cards are a handy way to extend that work, making it more accessible to all of us.

A book is a costly project but a card with short stories and a photo on the front to beckon the eye and introduce the topic is easy and can be kept in print for ever; it is inexpensive to produce and is easily stored.

It solves problems and has many uses.

Right now we are designing Inside Story Post Cards that on just one or two pieces of paper can take you though the whole life span of the Yosemite Chapel, showing its different faces through the years. Stories that are too short for a book can easily be fitted into an Inside Story Post Card. Components of one longer story can be fitted into cards that are then grouped as a set.

For instance, the story of a young woman named Virginia at the beginning of World War II who went to work in a factory in Los Angeles that produced air planes. The factory was in West Los Angeles and concealed by netting that made it look like a park. Her particular job was to fit needed pattern pieces onto scrap metal so that these pieces could be cut, recycled into smaller parts for the planes that were stored as they were completed in the field next to the factory that was disguised by the netting. Her training was in teaching so she had never imagined that she would be doing this kind of work. But her country was at war and she was determined to do what ever needed doing so that the war wound be won. Her younger brother went into the Navy; Virgina went to work in a factory.

When the field was full planes filled with pilots would start arriving one morning. More and more would come in throughout the day, staying at the factory. The people who worked there would be invited up to talk to them as the young men ate doughnuts and waited for night to come. Then, one by one hundreds of planes would take off into the night. The next morning, when Virginia came to work, the field would be bare. Sometimes when planes went down and the reports said what kind, the people working there would know it was one of theirs.

The war ended and life went on.

Miss Virginia went on to teach school for over fifty years. Nearly every child in her small town over that 50 years had her as a teacher. Every Halloween people from elderly to teenagers come by to see her and sit around and remember.

Today she runs th historical society in that same small town and through her work there has met some of the hundreds of people who were brought together to build those planes that, at the time, she never knew. Now she does.

Virginia is not someone about whom history books are written, but she made history, none the less.

There are several Inside Story Post Cards that Miss Virginia's stories can fill. Her stories and others demonstrate much more about who we are as Americans than you will learn from most history books.

The study of history should teach us about ourselves.

Inside Story Post Cards can be kept in plastic sleeves in a loose leaf notebook, both sides visible as you leaf through the book. It is like a book that has no covers; it is a book that can grow.

This is history outside the usual limits that can link us up in unexpected ways.

The cards about Yosemite that are now finished are titled:

The Snow Plant and the President's

The Curry Wedding, June 17, 1920

The First Aeroplane into Yosemite – May 27, 1919

The Four Graces of Yosemite – 1909

The Sentinel Hotel – 1907; the Grand Old Lady of Yosemite

Girls in Pants! 1916

Indian Mary takes a ride

The Trials of Winkey

Making the Primroses Blush under Half Dome

George Sterling - The Poet from Sag Harbor

Coming soon!

Teddy Roosevelt and the Grizzly Giant

Two Kids who loved Yosemite, Galen Clark and George Fiske

Indian Field Days and the Potato Race – 1916

What Foley told you about Yosemite

And a set:

A Tour of Old Village in five parts

If you want to order cards send an check to:

Pillsbury Picture Company, Inc.

27 W. Anapamu No. 255

Santa Barbara, CA 93101

Regular cards are $3.00 each, including postage.

If you would like First Issue Inside Story Post Cards they come with a certificate and short comment on how the cards came into being. They are enclosed in a clear envelope with hand numbered certificate and sell for $5.00 each. There are 200 of each and only 200 will be issued. When they are gone, they are gone.

If you would like Inside Story Post Cards for your own historical society or museum contact us at:

e-mail to: winkey@acpillsburyfoundation.com

The Tour of Old Village

The Tour of Old Village took place as scheduled on October 21 Around 30 people gathered inside the Chapel before we began the walk through the sites where the original Village of Yosemite stood until the late 1920s when it moved to its present location.

People came from Orange County, Santa Barbara, and elsewhere for the event.

Tom Bopp was along and took photos, capturing the stories shared by some of the old timers who joined us for the occasion. (I think Tom Bopp is Inside Story material.)

The Tour began at The Ship Stone, which is a large rock that at some time in the distant past fell from the heights above to embed itself in the meadow near the Wall of the Valley. The original road into the Valley ran just to the Wall side of the Ship Stone, which got its name from the Children of Arthur C. Pillsbury, who pretended it into a galleon and a ship of war and other exciting vehicles. My father, Arthur F. Pillsbury, lost his fear of heights on the Ship Stone when he was eight years old before beginning to climb the Valley walls themselves.

Our Tour rambled up along the road past each building the visitor to Yosemite would have seen in the year 1913. We closed our eyes and imagined what we would have been wearing in those years that were not so far removed from Queen Victoria. Women were reminded that they would have been in skirts and probably heavily strapped in with a corset.

As we walked along,entering what were in 1913, the busy streets of a small but vibrant village, we walked the place where the warehouse that became a Masonic Hall had been and heard from a former member of that Lodge. We looked at the original location for the blacksmith shop that now resides in Pioneer Village at Wawona.

A little further along we paused to see if we could capture the scent of bread, newly taken from the oven, in front of the Degnan Bakery and Restaurant; we imagined cinnamon rolls and looked across the street to the Post Office, which was busy because the mail was the usual way most people communicated with their friends and family in 1913. We peeked into the Grocery Store to see the variety of supplies carried both for those who lived and worked in the Village and for the visitors they served.

The next steps, north towards Sentinel Bridge took us past Artist's Row, and the studios of Best. Boysen, and the the home place of the Foley Guide, that Bible for the visitor to Yosemite also used to advertise in by concessionaires.

We in turn visited each building, adding the memories of old timers to those those of myself as guide. Old Timers paced out locations, remembering and laughing at what they had forgotten.

We ended up several hours later back in the parking lot of the Yosemite Chapel, our sponsors for the day, and enjoyed lunch together, continuing to talk about the place that no longer is – except in our memories.

We ate lunch on the site of the Studio of the Three Arrows, the Old Village home of the Pillsbury Family. We gathered and looked at pictures that illustrated how the Studio looked when the first nature film was run there for visitors on the porch in the evening after night had fallen. I personally looked for the footprint of the Studio itself, imagining the corner shelf where those first lapse-time movies of plants were taken. Dad's tent, where he spent every summer from the time he was seven until he went away to college, was just behind the Chapel; a location covered now by the new office occupied by Brent and Faith Moore.

Next time, and there will be a next time, we intend to do more to bring the Old Village to life. Perhaps a miniature replica; perhaps temporary buildings occupying the old footprints of the buildings. Or maybe next time we will come in costume. Now that would be interesting.

If the year were 1913, who would you be? We have time – think about it!

Thanks to Ray Duarte, the Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation archivist, who came and brought with him the two tallish stacks of images blown up to help us imagine our way back in time and to Connie, Ray's wife, who always helps with these endeavors and to all of the Old Timers, some of them not so old, who came and contributed their wonderful memories of past joys, friendships, and insights. And to everyone else – thanks for being there. You made the day for me.

Innovations in Advertising

I really love it when people send me scans of old post cards. And sometimes what is best is not the formal production photos; all of the Yosemite photographers produced those, but the unusual things that give me insights that help me make connections that had puzzled me.

Marilynn Guske contacted me about a card she has in her collection. In the course of the exchange she sent it on to me and when I opened the file it made me laugh.

As you can see, the card is from 1910, the same year that AC took the first ship to ship photos at the San Dominguez Air Show in Los Angeles. The card is a cheerful advertisement for the motion pictures of nature that AC was using to increase his market share as a concessionaire in Yosemite. Competition for the few thousand tourists who came through the Valley was fierce in those early days and AC was always the first to see how innovations could help him improve his position.

The card is laid out with text saying, “Dear________________

Am just eating dinner now after a delightful trip. This evening we visit the Pillsbury Studio, who also have the Three Arrows Studio in Yosemite, and later will enjoy an open air Stereopticon Show.

The Motion Picture Show by Pillsbury in Yosemite is a wonderful treat. Will write more tomorrow.” (and the sender, relieved of the need to think of anything else to say, then signed it.)

In the Spring issue I will quote from some of the letters written to the Park Service complaining about the innovations AC employed from other concessionaires demanding he be stopped!

The card was a give away, provided to the visitors at the Del Portal who were on their way into the Valley. They could read it and get the message and then send it on to a friend or family member, letting them know they had arrived safely. The front of the card is a standard production post card of the Del Portal, probably familiar to all of you.

Marilynn actually sent two scans from advertising cards and the second one also told a story that, if I had known it at the time, I might have included in the Inside Story Post Card for the First Aeroplane into Yosemite.

The other side of this card is the interesting image of a girl dressed like an American Indian holding an American Flag and standing out on Overhanging Rock. I have seen the post card without this advertising and note on many occasions and it looks like my Aunt Grace. The card was originally made in a flood of patriotic fervor at the beginning of WWI while AC was attempting with his usual energy to join the corp of much younger men who were floating in balloons over enemy lines in France taking photos of enemy placements. The life expectancy was very short, sort of like being a forward observer in Vietnam.

The war was over too soon for AC to finish using up all of the cards that he printed so in the usual thrifty New England fashion he continued to use them until they were gone. This one, with hand written invitation to a motion picture showing of, “Birds, flowers and trees.” on September 22, 1921.

AC's attempts to become dead in France are chronicled on the Inside Story Post Card.

That is all for the Winter. See you next year and have a wonderful and completely Pillsbury Christmas.

Fall 2005 Volume 1 Number 3

Editor: Melinda Pillsbury-Foster
MPF@acpillsburyfoundation.com

Url for online store: http://www.cafepress.com/pillsburypicco

The following article is the flyer that will accompany the newly reissued panoramas memorializing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire

A Short History of

the Pillsbury Picture Company

Founded by A. C. Pillsbury, March 1906

Refounded, March 2004

by Melinda Pillsbury-Foster

The Pillsbury Picture Company went through several incarnations during and before its formal founding less than four weeks before the tremors of the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire destroyed that city.

Arthur Clarence Pillsbury started his first business while still a student at Stanford. He had followed his older brother, Ernest Sargent, to that institution as students in the first and second classes while the University was still under construction.

The Pillsbury Family had settled in Auburn, California in 1883 and the mother, Dr. Harriet Foster Pillsbury started a medical practice. Her husband, Dr. Harlin Henry Pillsbury, focused on putting in a fruit ranch, assisted by the boys.

The first business A. C. started himself was a shop that supplied the needs of students and residents for two edge technologies, bicycles and cameras. The business stood near the small hospital run by Drs. Harriet and Harlin and also supplied their living quarters.

While still at Stanford A. C. invented a specimen slicer to produce slides for a microscope. He traveled around campus on the motorcycle he built in his shop, the first in California. He was rarely without a camera in his hands and sold copies of his photos in his shop. These included the solios, small contact photos pasted onto embossed cardboard, that held the images of such events as the first fraternity Rush as well as views of the newly constructed buildings on campus.

His final invention while on campus was the first circuit panorama camera. He produced the plans and showed it to his senior adviser who told him it could not work. A. C. built it anyway. It worked. He quit school and took the camera, along with his father, to the Yukon, producing the panorama images familiar to many of the opening of the mining towns and trails filled with hopeful miners hiking towards them.

The miners in the raw new towns were delighted to pay in gold dust for panorama photos of those towns and themselves. A. C. accomplished this by taking a canoe from the headwaters of the Yukon to the ocean, photographing this hive of human activity along the way while enjoying the wilderness and living off the land. Dr. Harlin had staying in Anchorage to fine tune his chess playing. A. C. developed the photos in the portable dark room he installed in his canoe.

In 1900, after two years of adventures that included ship wrecks and gaping chasms in errant glaciers, he spent time photographing Washington State and then headed south to Los Angeles. His brother Ernest was now a practicing physician in Los Angeles. A. C. helped build and install the solar heating system in the new Pillsbury home that stood at the corner of what is now Hollywood Blvd and North Las Palmas. Then, Hollywoodland was a residential neighborhood with large homes surrounded by large properties. Drs. Harriet and Harlin had settled in, attending the First Congregationalist Church in Los Angeles and visiting with family in Redlands and Tahoe. The automobile had become a family fixture in 1900 when Dr. Ernest purchased his first Locomobile.

During this period A. C. photographed much of the South West from the deserts to the Grand Canyon, to Catalina. By 1900 he had a catalog of images that included 1000 panoramas.

In 1903 A. C. headed back to San Francisco to a job on the San Francisco Examiner as a photojournalist. He quit that job to found the Pillsbury Picture Company. They toasted the event in orange juice because the family was White Feather, meaning that they supported voluntary abstinence from alcohol.

On the morning of April 18, 1906 A. C. grabbed his camera before he hit the floor. Moments later he had possessed himself of a graaflax camera and his panorama. He was on his way to the City.

In the aftermath of the Quake A. C. married, took a honeymoon that included a tour of all of California, and purchased, for the second time, a studio in Yosemite. His first bride, a fellow student at Stanford, had left him because he had purchased a studio in Yosemite with Julius Boysen in 1897, two years after his first visit to Yosemite by bicycle from San Francisco. He sold his share to Boysen and, heartbroken, headed to the Yukon. Now he had returned.

In 1906 he also photographed all of the Missions in California and took panoramas throughout the state, showing the changes since those he had taken in 1900.

Throughout the period of 1900 – 1903 he was often back in Yosemite and always with his camera in hand. There he photographed Theodore Roosevelt during the President's trip there in 1903.

The next four years would be his 'artistic period.' The photos he produced in this period show that he along with producing prodigious numbers of images that reflected his background as a photojournalist he also was thinking about the artistic effects that he could produce with his camera. Sunshine through Redwoods, and other images reflect amazing depth, capturing strong emotional tones. He also began producing and selling d'orotones, photos backed in gold that had an almost holographic sheen and intensity.

With shops in Yosemite and in San Francisco he had time to consider other issues. Edge technology continued to call. In 1909 he used a balloon he named, The Fairy to photograph the ongoing rebuilding of San Francisco. During this process the balloon, which had been tethered from a tug in the harbor ripped free. Holding on like grim death to his camera he was catapulted into the sky. The afternoon papers reported him lost but he returned, muddied but with film mostly intact. In 1910 he took the first ship to ship photos from the same balloon at the San Dominguez Air Show in Los Angeles. As he so often did, he wrote an article, illustrating it himself with the photos. This article appeared in Sunset Magazine.

In 1911, after a life of extraordinary invention and adventure he became a father three times over when in the aftermath of the death of his brother, Dr. Ernest and his sister-in-law in an auto accident, he adopted their three children, ages 12 – 6.

His wife, AEtheline had agreed to this only if the children spent six months of the year in Yosemite. So for the on the kids were expected to finish essential school work and be ready to go to Yosemite as soon as the Studio opened. When they returned school was already in session. The Studio of the Three Arrows became their real home.

In 1912 A. C. made and showed the first nature film at the Studio of the Three Arrows in Yosemite. Young Arthur F., then seven, years old, had helped identify figures for the timing device that A. C. made to develop the first lapse-time motion picture camera. A. C. had been watching the wild flowers disappear and he was determined to allow people to see and understand why that should not happen. The showing took place on the porch of the Three Arrows in Old Village. Over the years he worked on developing better cameras to improve the process. As had been the case in the previous generation, the whole family worked together.

The kids were lonely the first year, missing their friends. So A. C. invited the friends to come up and stay at the studio, living and working in the compound that then stood clustered near the Yosemite Chapel. It became a School in the sense that many things, from photography to art to history, to edge technology were studied and explored along with the heights and delights of Yosemite.

In 1924 the Studio of the Three Arrows moved to New Village. In the next decades A. C. would continue to invent and lecture. His goal was to provide the tools that extended the sight of humanity beyond its boundaries. He succeeded. His inventions would provide the tools that scientists still use today.

The children grew up, had children of their own, and remembered.

List of inventions after 1920.

1922 – Patents first mass producing photo postcard machine

1927 – Finishes invention and construction of first microscopic notion picture camera

1929 – First X-ray motion picture camera

1929 – Patents film advancer for motion picture camera

1930 – First underwater motion picture camera

1942 – Identifies process of osmosis in plants

You are invited on a

Tour of Yosemite's Old Village

Friday, October 21, 2005 – 10:00AM

Starting in the Parking Lot of the Yosemite Chapel

The Tour will meet up in the parking lot and then we will walk over to the place where my Dad said he used as the 'landmark' that told him they had almost arrived. The road into the Village used to run along the Bridal Veil Wall of the Valley and not as it does today through what used to be Lower Village.

I am not going to tell you everything I will tell you on the Tour because then what would be the point of having it? This is just to let you know when, where, and what so no one gets misplaced.

Old Village holds a lot of fascination for folks partly because it isn't there anymore. But also parts of Yosemite's history lived themselves out there and never moved on to the site of the New Village. George Fiske, a well loved and respected Yosemite photographer, died in Old Village. Others who never knew the New Village included John Muir and Galen Clark, both champions of the whole of Yosemite whose names have rightfully gone down in history for their staunch work on behalf of what is truly one of the most beautiful places on Earth.

What we will be doing is taking a nice slow walk along the old road, up through the Village, and along the one street, that for most of the time Old Village existed was packed dirt. Then we will end up back at the Chapel and there will be some things to look at. If you would like to bring your lunch some of us will be eating together there afterwards. Questions are welcomed, and I very much hope that others with knowledge about Old Village will get in touch with me in advance so that their knowledge can be added to what I know. It is always more interesting that way. My phone number and e-mail address are at the bottom of the page.

I am not old enough to remember Old Village myself. Quite. But my Dad told me about growing up there and the stories fascinated me as a child and teenager. I am sure we will all have a good time. Thanks to the Yosemite Chapel, Brent and Faith, for the idea and for sponsoring the event. Look forward to seeing you there!

Melinda Pillsbury-Foster

For information contact:

Winkey@acpillsburyfoundation.com

Visit the Website at:

acpillsburyfoundation.com

Image: AC Newsletter:

http://imageacpillsbury.blogspot.com

The Real Yosemite. A Book with more stories than have been told.

When I first picked up the book it was with a sense of duty. I had set myself the task of creating a time line to subsume all of the events that related to the life and career of my grandfather, A. C. Pillsbury and this was another one of the many projects that had filled his life. It was a book that was assembled at home, including a few photos and some text and dusty little illustrations. I opened the book up and pressed it down on the flatbed scanner. I am a person who focuses on the words. Those I had read. The Legend of the Lost Arrow was very familiar to me; I had hear it from my father as a small girl in several versions. This one was different, more like the original I had read in a book by Galen Clark only a few years ago.

The image resolved on the screen of my computer. It was a donkey. I smiled. The stories about Winkey were legion. I marked the jpeg for remastering and scanned again.

As I worked my way through the book, not really thinking about what I was seeing, I thought about the stories Father had told me about his boyhood in Yosemite. The evenings had been filled with camaraderie. When he was little the legends and stories of Yosemite had filled their minds and morphed into stories that, as an adult, I had recognized were a weaving of the original Miwok folk traditions and drawn from classical mythology and added to family stories and even events then in motion.

Father's eyes had twinkled when he told me some of the stories. Those were usually the best.

I had finished marking every image and begun to stand up when suddenly my mind caught on a smudged mark. I sat down again.

I had to look for it. Then I had to blow it up to several times the original size.

There it was. The familiar logo for the Studio of the Three Arrows on the tiny photographic plate the cameraman that, now that I looked at him, was clearly AC.

He was photographing four figures on horseback. In 1909 mounting up and riding out was de rigeur for a vacation in Yosemite. Two of the figures were women and the other man is obscured. But one was clearly a man, and not just any man; a ranger. His face was clearly drawn from life. I put that one in a special folder and proceeded through the other illustrations.

In the end I was able to identify several of the figures as people who were well known in Yosemite at the time. I am not going to put names on them here. I am going to let you do that. So here is one for now. Happy guessing!

Upcoming:

The winter edition of the newsletter will have the article on The Real Yosemite, the book published by AC on 1909 featuring illustrations with a witty edge to them.

Kathy Stewart, who so generously donated the album she inherited from her Great-Aunt Florance is assembling information on Florance. Florance was a teacher who lived and worked in Alhambra, California. Her story promises to be intriguing.

Summer 2006 Volume 1 Number 2

A Voice for the Wild Flowers

By Melinda Pillsbury-Foster

Cars zip past the site every day, unaware that history was made here over ninety years ago though no one remembers. The occupants of those cars are enraptured by one of the most glorious and compelling venues in the world, Yosemite.

If the tourist's vision is distracted from the magnificent heights and vistas of the Valley looming all around them for a moment that attention focuses on the undulating meadows or even on the Yosemite Chapel that still stands just where it has been for over a century.

Yosemite has that effect on us.

It is the transcendental beauty of Yosemite that made it the focus for many in the environmental movement. Many of the first activists, Galen Clark, John Muir, among them, were inspired by that beauty and, appropriately, the first nature film was made and shown in Yosemite Valley in 1912.

This surprises most people. Firsts of all kinds are normally widely proclaimed by those involved. The reason for this oversight is understandable. The making of the first nature film was perhaps the least important factor in play at that moment in history.

The man who saw the need, built the camera, made the film, showed it to the Park Service and extracted their commitment to change policy was Arthur C. Pillsbury. He was determined to give nature, in this case the wild flowers, a voice of its own. That he was successful is evidenced by
the fact that it is images of nature that drove the environmental movement from the time he showed his first movie until today.

The world of 1912 was very different from today.

The technology of the 20^th Century was altering the values and perceptions of the 19^th . Photography would play a pivotal role throughout the century. The inventions that would take the human eye inside the cell, under the ocean, and make it possible to see a flower blooming would prove to be transformational in many ways. Photography would remake the tiny environmental movement into a major force for conservation. Pictures of the world of nature would allow nature a voice it had never had before.

A. C. Pillsbury was the determining factor in the direction of change. He was the first to see that technology could be used to change the course of history by providing more enlightened understanding of the natural world. He saw the potential that would allow nature the voice it desperately needed.

He believed the images would tell their own story.

It was in the second decade of the 1900s that America began to see the images and therefore understood the need for conservation. The environmental movement of the 19^th Century produced volumes of words about the natural world, but was attempting to swim upstream against the
tides of change that were taking Americans into the cities and suburbs and away from a day to day relationship with nature.

At the beginning of the second decade of the 20^th Century environmentalism involved only a limited elite, those who had time, money and inclination to spend time in the wilderness. Theodore Roosevelt, the president most committed to preservation, became committed to a view of conservation that included husbanding the resources of lumber and water. Trees, with their majesty and awesome size, were the horticultural focus of the work of Muir and the Sierra Club from 1906 until Muir's death in 1914. Environmentalists saw nature as something to be preserved unchanged. They saw humanity as separate. A. C. Pillsbury saw them as expressions of the same evolutionary forces. Humanity needed to be reminded of the generative power of Nature to understand its relationship with the Earth.

Sometimes the same agenda can come from different perspectives.

Muir's death came at the end of his losing battle to defend Hetch Hetchy from being dammed as a water supply for San Francisco. Muir lost that battle, deemed to be the most vigorous of his career despite his unremitting efforts and the assistance of hundreds of activists. Muir did not use images in his campaign. He relied on words, petition, and pleas to government at the state and national levels. An elitist movement had failed to move an elitist government.

There is a general tendency to credit Muir with anything having to do with conservation during the early 1900s. This is not supported by the facts. Muir's focus was on Hetch Hetchy. His horticultural attentions, where they went anywhere, were on trees. His attitude on action and on his priorities is encapsulated in this quote:

"Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed -- chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones... Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ's time -- and long before that -- God has cared for these trees... but he cannot save them from fools -- only Uncle Sam can do that."

The focus of Muir's life and of the Sierra Club was to persuade government to act to preserve places like Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy. At that point in time no one had mentioned the wild flowers that were rapidly disappearing. The wild flowers would become a test case to prove that a picture is worth many thousands of words.

It happened in Yosemite.

A small boy who watched that showing under a night sky lit with stars, enchanted as the images of a flower danced its way into bloom, flickering across the small screen hung on the porch of the Studio of the Three Arrows in Old Yosemite Village told me about how it had touched him.

When he told me about that evening the little boy, AC ‘s son and my father, had become a very old man, but the showing was still alive in his memory for many reasons. It had been a proud moment. This was the first time a group of people gathered and saw with their own eyes a flower blooming, an event that takes, depending on the kind of flower, hours or weeks in our time to
film. He had helped make that happen.

That first showing took place in the summer of 1912.

The man who invented the camera, made the film, and then narrated that evening's presentation was Arthur C. Pillsbury, the owner of the Studio of the Three Arrows. Later the same year A. C. Pillsbury showed the film to those who could change policy with the Park Service. One showing was
enough to do that. The impact of images was already being felt.

The technical details of how the process was originated were cataloged in Picturing Miracles of Plant and Animal Life_ by Arthur C. Pillsbury, published by J.B. Lippincott, 1937. Through the decades of the twenties and thirties lapse-time films and the many other films A. C. produced through his business, the Pillsbury Picture Co., Inc. would continue to bring alive the fascinating world of nature. His work is also collected for its superb beauty. It is easy to photograph beauty and touch the viewers heart, but A. C. Pillsbury had also touched their minds.

His films would be shown both in Yosemite and in theaters around the country as short subjects before the main showing. At first only A.C. made such films but soon it became an industry that continues to this day, moving from the big screen to the small one of television and from there on to the Internet.

A.C.'s films would also be shown as part of the lecture series that took A. C. around the world. A. C. lectured before the National Geographic Society in Washington, D. C. many times. A. C. sold his films to others so they, too, could use them in presentations. David Curry used films produced by the Pillsbury Picture Company for his own lecture tour.

A. C. addressed the Town Hall in New York, was invited to MIT and most major universities. Those who heard him said it was an experience they would never forget and most of the movers and shakers in America attended one or more of his lectures and screenings. Most Americans first saw a flower blooming and the unlocking of the mysterious, unseen life of the microscopic first in one of the films A.C. produced with a camera he built himself. A. C. had majored in mechanical engineering
while at Stanford. His films were purchased by schools and universities for their own use, as well. Many of those reels of film wore out, screened into fragments.

A. C. Pillsbury was a visionary and an activist who used cameras instead of petitions. He ignored politics as a source of frustration, choosing a path straight into the minds and hearts of the public. He was convinced that the best solution was insights from education that could evolve
into persuaded commitment on the part of the public. As an individual he lived within his limitations and he was a busy man. When we are busy we try to solve several problems simultaneously. One of the problems he needed to solve was personal.

The personal story, the 'why' remained with the small boy who grew up in Yosemite and Berkeley and went on to a career in engineering. That story did not make it into the books, it was private. My father told me about that evening after he retired from the University of California and was living with my older sister in 1990.
The porch where that small boy watched the showing was between the road and the Yosemite Chapel. It, and the entire village that once stood there, are now gone with the exception of the concrete sidewalks that line the street between the Chapel and Sentinel Bridge. In 1912 the Village was the hub for the Valley. The Studio of the Three Arrows stood at the most prominent corner at the bottom of the Village near the Chapel. The corner was a Y where the main road into the valley joined the main
street of the Village. The road into the Valley at that point ran near the valley wall and turned left into the Village in front of the Studio of the Three Arrows.

A. C.'s concern had been growing for several years. In 1912 the wild flowers were disappearing from Yosemite. He saw species vanish. The meadows, where the Evening Primrose lived, were being mowed by the Park Service, then under the management of the U. S. Cavalry. The Park Service used the small amount of 'hay' thus produced as fodder for their horses. A. C. was a student of botany and was appalled by the steady attrition and loss of entire species. He could have petitioned and written letters but instead he took stock of the tools at hand and did something else. A. C. still believed individuals could make a difference.

In so doing he solved several problems at one time and spoke volumes about how he looked at the world.

He needed a chore that his youngest son could help with that would take the boy's mind off a family tragedy that had taken place the year before, an accident in which the boy had been injured that had left him afraid of heights. Young Arthur was set up in Bridal Veil Meadow, then the closest location where they could find the flowers he wanted to photograph, with a stop watch and pencil and paper. He was told to time the motion of several varieties of flowers. For several hours a week Young Arthur did this, determining the time it took for six different species of flowers to go from bud to bloom. Over the next several months
Young Arthur fell in love with nature. He learned to climb, extinguishing his fear by learning how to scale the Ship Stone, a rock that still sits near the site of Old Village. His desire to find flowers
and careful training helped him conquer the fear of heights instilled in him by the accident.

While this was going on, in his spare time, A.C. Pillsbury, perfected the first working mechanism for a camera that allowed for the automatic exposure of film at set intervals, making the process of lapse-time for plants possible. He used Young Arthur's notes to do this. Then the
operation was moved to a shelf in the very cramped Studio of the Three Arrows and a budded plant was transplanted there to be filmed.

From Miracles of Plant and Animal Life by Arthur C. Pillsbury

“This early work was carried out as a hobby in my Yosemite Studio. Only
the most cramped space was available – the camera on a narrow shelf so
it could slid back and forth, the flower in the corner and just room to
squeeze in beside the camera to focus it and tend the flower. The
results were shown in the little evening entertainments we gave the
Yosemite tourists on our open porch. A few flowers at first, the number
increasing year by year, until all of the most distinctive ones were
pictured......One of the first reactions of seeing a reel of flowers
growing and opening was to instill a love for them, a realization of
their life struggles so similar to ours, and a wish to do something to
stop the ruthless destruction of them which was fast causing them to
become extinct.”

The Studio of the Three Arrows became a learning center for Yosemite using the technology of photography in ways that were eventually copied throughout the world. The 'informal entertainments' provided in the evening for tourists became a standard still used today.

Films were shown, lectures given; questions answered; Cards illustrated with tinted photos the types of plants and flowers to be identified were sold.

The employees, A. C.'s children and their friends spending the summer in the small compound of tents clustered around the Studio, became a school for photography, botany, Sierra zoology and art. They produced the post cards, tinted the cards, practiced their photography, and learned to identify all of the plants and animals living in the Valley. At the Studio the visitor could buy a box of those botanical cards with a tinted print of the flower on one side and a description of the plant on the back. Awareness helped to build the movement for preservation, just as A. C. had thought it would.

Images, connecting directly to the emotions of the viewer, changed public opinion through education and opened up an avenue for environmentalism to the general public. Lapse-time films would become staples in Hollywood within a a handful of years, the microscopic films following soon after the invention of that camera in 1927.
Entrepreneurship, using the innovations provided by an individual moved fast.
Most of the young people who worked at the Studio of the Three Arrows were from Berkeley and Stanford. They went on to careers in every imaginable profession, carrying with them the lessons they learned at the Studio of the Three Arrows in Yosemite.

One the back of the card for the Snow Plant it says,

“ Sarcodes Sanguines or Snow Plant grows up through the pine needles as
soon as the snow melts, throughout the Sierras at an elevation from four
thousand feet up. The lower fleshy, semi-transparent stalks have long
curling bracts, among which the wonderful flaming red waxen bells hang,
the whole plant looking like a glowing lighted taper in the aisle of a
cathedral. It is a saprophyte, growing in clumps. I have counted twenty
in a group.”

The front of the card:

The Outcome for Environmentalism

In the wake of making the first lapse-time film of wild flowers a newly revitalized movement for conservation sprang up. A. C. had shown his film to many garden clubs throughout California and especially around Berkeley in Northern California near the Pillsbury home; it had an impact. Women's groups began asking for protection for wild flowers. Then as today, it was the images, not words, that made this possible.

The year after he introduced the first film of a flower blooming another problem introduced itself to his attention. This time it was the economic marginalization of the Native Americans who had originally lived in Yosemite, the Miwok. A. C. began thinking about the problem because his three kids had become interested in playing Indians. A. C. had already published a book with some of the legends of the Miwok when a friend of the family who had studied the ways of Native Americans came to spend time in the Valley during the summer of 1913. She encouraged the kids to dress up as Plains Indians and for the next several years the Studio of the Three Arrows rang with play acting and crafts learned from the Miwok still living in the Valley.

Through this interaction A. C. became aware of the economic problems the Miwok faced. His solution was the institution of what was called Indian Field Days. This event took place in August of every year and brought together tourists and concessionaires to enjoy a series of games with prizes and the opportunity for the Miwok to sell their baskets, a craft that provided badly needed income. A. C. became the chief organizer for all of the entertainments that drew people to Yosemite.

All of the photographic concessionaires took pictures of the Indians. They then sold prints to tourists thus making a profit. But it was A. C. who thought about how the problem faced by the Miwok, in the face of progressive policy that ignored their heritage, their needs, and their dignity, could be surmounted.

We now understand the impact that compelling visuals can have on events. Vietnam and other major events have proven that public opinion shifts fastest on images. Visuals drove the culture of the last century. Visuals are still the most potent medium for change, now at the beginning of the 21^st . Consider for the moment the impact of the photos from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as opposed to the written reports. It is the visuals that evoke our outrage, our sympathy and our action. In 1912 A. C. already understood very well. Others had been working, talking and writing. A. C. supplied the visuals.

A.C.'s earlier career included years as a photo journalist. He had recorded the first fraternity Rush at Stanford University, chronicled the opening of the mining towns in the Yukon with a panorama camera he built while still a student at Stanford in 1896. He took the panoramas of the burning of San Francisco that made vivid and real to the world the destruction of that great city. Those became the images published every where that brought the reality home to humanity. A. C. would use
the profits from the San Francisco photos to buy his studio in Yosemite.

Images tell the story; they penetrate our minds and and emotions, staying with us, changing how we view the world and events. Images far more than words move us to action. The story of the wild flower, its struggle to live, its beauty and endurance, first became real for humanity on the porch of the Studio of the Three Arrows in Yosemite.
Seeing was believing.

A.C. helped others learn his techniques, always glad to share. He made his inventions available to everyone, refusing to patent them. This included the lapse-time camera for photographing flowers, the X-ray motion picture camera (1917), the microscopic motion picture camera (1927), and the underwater motion picture camera (1930). This was not ignorance but evidence of his personal commitment to education.

These became tools for Hollywood almost immediately. Hollywood knew a
good thing when it saw it.

A. C. said in a magazine article printed in Sunset Magazine in the spring of 1927 written about the development of his microscopic motion picture camera, “ I believe this discovery will be of inestimable value in bacteriology and probably will lead to much greater knowledge of
communicable diseases, their cause, prevention and cure.” Then he added: “This invention is to be dedicated to educational purposes. I could not think of even attempting to make money out of it. I will not commercialize it.” The writer, H. H. Dunn, went on to say, “ That is the attitude of the Californian who, saying he is not a scientist, yet has made one of the most important contributions to the science of medicine.”

The applications would prove to be endless.

A. C.'s goal was to solve problems, giving scientists and the public better tools for understanding the world around them. He had been invited to Berkeley to finish the development of the camera whose images proved to be transformational for that generation of scientists. His ability to see the application for innovations to solve problems was one aspect of the lesson his life offers. The second is his willingness to share, thus enriching the world with images that have become our common heritage. Individuals can solve our problems if they have the freedom and desire to do so.

The lapse-time camera was one step in a logical progression through the life and work of one man. As Margaret Mead would say a few years later, “A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.” The individual is the smallest group of
people. Sometimes that is all it takes.

Clearly, A. C. did not rest on his laurels. He moved on to other projects. For him there were always more things to do, enough to fill several life times. In refusing to patent his inventions he believed he was making them most available to the world. He was also following the rules by which he had been raised, to serve others and society. That probably seems naive today. It isn't really. It is still the right thing to do when it is what we choose for ourselves.

The innovations of A. C. Pillsbury provided the tools that were used by him and others to transform the way we see the physical world and ourselves. They accomplished the goals seamlessly. They provided insights into disease and cures. They were used by the entertainment Industry to make countless movies that helped formulate our views of the world in which we live; Hollywood also used them to connect us to worlds of the imagination. His inventions were and are used in schools from
primary to graduate all over the world every single day.

His inventions took the words on the page and converted them into images that touched us emotionally. When you go to the theater and see the worlds beyond our eyes now you will know how and where the means were created. A. C. Pillsbury was a man who rejected the idea that government
had all the answers. He believed the answers were with individuals – and he was right.

When you drive by the Chapel in Yosemite now you will know what happened there and why it matters.

Spring 2005 Volume 1 Number 1

Tracing the path of Arthur C. Pillsbury

by
Melinda Pillsbury-Foster

mpf@acpillsburyfoundation.com

Right now I am on the East Coast working on things that on the face of
it have nothing to do with my grandfather, A.C. Pillsbury. But because of the
curious way that things connect I have found him in unexpected places both
from the presence of his photographic images and from articles on his lectures
and adventures.

This last year one of his prints showed up in an old house in
Pennsylvania. The present owner of the piece is now checking to see if
this print, from 1910, was sent to a friend of relation of Sylvia Ball
Pillsbury, A.C.'s sister-in-law with whom he grew up in Auburn
California. The print was found in a dusty attic in Williamsport,
Pennsylvania, just a handful of miles from the tiny town where Sylvia
was born, Balls Mill, and which was named for her family, who owned and
ran factories and mills there for several generations.

At the most curiously unexpected times I find myself looking at a photo and
realize that even if I have never seen this particular image when I turn it over I
will discover that it is by A.C. I have found his post cards all over the East
Coast, actually they appear there far more frequently than they do now in
California. A friend who sells 'paper' on e-bay finds A.C. Postcards in old
albums, carefully glued in instead of home made photos from that period.

This brings me to the innovation A.C. Introduced to meet the needs of
his customers who really preferred to buy their photos already made
instead of learning how to do it themselves. A. C. produced little copies
of his standard photos that found their way into albums across the world.

These came in several sizes because A.C. always wanted to provide exactly
what the customer wanted.

But A.C. had also written careful instructions for how to produce ones
own photographs. He was well aware not everyone wanted to invest the time
in learning to do it themselves.

For those who did want to know how to photograph Yosemite A. C.
wrote out instructions which appeared in this book in 1021. The text is
reproduced here much as it appeared in the original. As you read through
the instructions A.C.'s love of Yosemite jumps off the the age along
with his delight in sharing his love of photography.

If you want to continue getting this quarterly newsletter for the AC
Pillsbury Foundation send me a note and I will put you on the list or visit
our website at acpillsburyfoundation.com
Melinda Pillsbury-Foster

Photography in Yosemite National Park


Handbook of Yosemite National Park (1921)
by Arthur C. Pillsbury

------------------------------------------------------------------------


PHOTOGRAPHY IN YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK

By Arthur C. Pillsbury, Yosemite California

No souvenir of a vacation can compare with one’s pictures. They are more
than mere records of the scenery; each has its own associations, and
each brings back memories outside the photo itself. We should strive,
however, to produce photographs which have an intrinsic worth as
pictures—likenesses which express our own impressions to others. In
Yosemite Valley attractive views disclose themselves to every side and
even the amateur will have no trouble in securing beautiful pictures if
he but give a little thought to composition and correct exposures.

Few people realize what an important part light and shade play in the
composition of photographs. Under the high noonday sun most pictures are
"flat" and lifeless, and it is during the morning and afternoon hours
that the photographer gets his best exposures. The Yosemite features
change rapidly in this respect from hour to hour during the day, and the
following suggestions are offered with the hope that they will help to
solve some of the visitor’s problems.

From within the Valley itself the surrounding mountains and cliffs
appear high and near—consequently you would better point the camera /up/
to take their tops. Do not be afraid of distorting them as you would a
tall building if you did the same thing, for in Nature there are no
parallel lines so marked as to offend in a picture

As to lighting, one should remember that no matter how beautiful a
subject is at a given time, it is /most/ beautiful at some certain hours
during the day. Yosemite Falls is a good example. At nine o'clock the
sun is casting shadows across its cliffs, and the Falls are very
beautiful, but the foreground is more or less in the shadow. By ten the
sun is on the foreground and full on the cliffs, but the light is a
little "flat" and stays so until about one or half past. After this time
the Falls are casting their shadows, and every rocket as it shoots out
casts /its/ shadow, so they seem to stand out clear cut from the wall.
This latter effect increases until two or half past, when the lower half
of the Lower Fall is in the shadow. These light and shade effects, in
the writer’s opinion, make the best picture. After two thirty the change
is very rapid and by three o'clock the Falls are almost entirely shaded.

Bridalveil Falls are in the shadow all the morning hours, so close views
are not good until one o'clock when the upper half of the Falls is
touched by sunshine and veiled by wonderfully luminous mist. This, their
best time and condition for posing, continues until two thirty.

El Capitan from "River View" has several lighting effects that are
pleasing. From seven to eight in the morning the shadow cast by the
granite wall makes a bold picture which is particularly good in
enlargements. During the late morning hours the sun beats down on its
smooth face without shadows until one o'clock, when the profile begins
to stand out, and ridges, quite unnoticed half an hour before, begin to
assume shape and substance; these, the best effects, are of short duration.

At Happy Isles, the Meeting of the Waters, the best time for photographs
is from ten to twelve o'clock. Going on up the trail one will find a
triangle of sunshine on the lovely Vernal Falls at ten, which continues
to light their wonderful outpouring of jewels and color until about
eleven; later they are apt to be but a broad white streak in one’s picture.

Nevada Falls seems a thing of life between eleven and twelve thirty when
its great rockets cast shadows upon the face of the Fall, but when fully
lit by the sun it does not picture as well.

Mirror Lake is at its best until, at about eight o'clock, its surface is
struck by the sun, and it loses its reflective power. After this time it
is disappointing unless the sky holds floating clouds which produce the
most beautiful effect of all.

The foregoing remarks are but a few of the many which might be included
if space permitted. The writer will be pleased to make further such
suggestions to those who will see him personally in Yosemite.

A word about the time of one’s exposures. Compared with the smoke-laden
atmosphere of cities, the light in Yosemite is much faster and clearer,
giving strong negatives and good prints and enlargements. The normal
exposure within the Valley should be 1/25 second at U. S. stop 8. Mirror
Lake before sunrise requires about 1/5 second exposure at U. S.
aperature 8, and pictures taken beneath the Big Trees should be given
about 1/2 second with the same opening.

At higher altitudes the atmosphere becomes thinner, with the effect that
the sky appears more intensely blue but at the same time becomes darker,
the sun’s rays become brighter and hotter, and the shadows become deeper
and colder. As we ascend we get less diffused illumination from the
atmosphere itself, and less protection from the direct rays of the sun.
We will therefore get more contract in our negatives which are exposed
at the higher elevations, and on account of the more intense light the
camera should be stopped down to 16 for 1/25 second exposure.

Distant views require only half as much exposure as near-by subjects.
Instead of reducing the exposure the better plan is to diminish the
opening so as to admit less light.

If the above suggestions are borne in mind the amateur will find no
difficulty in obtaining really good pictures during his Yosemite vacation.
_________________________________________________________________________
Next: Appendix
http://www.yosemite.ca.us/history/handbook_of_yosemite_national_park/appendix.html
• Contents
http://www.yosemite.ca.us/history/handbook_of_yosemite_national_park/
• Previous: Motoring in Yosemite
http://www.yosemite.ca.us/history/handbook_of_yosemite_national_park/motoring.html