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Fred A. Gildersleeve: Photographs Tell the Story

Script for KWBU-FM and Texas NPR Stations

By Terri Jo Ryan

HOST (Mary Landon Darden)

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the life’s work of photographer Fred A. Gildersleeve of Waco is surely worth several million. For more than half a century, the diminutive lens man documented nearly every aspect of life in this Heart of Texas locale. The Texas Collection at Baylor University is home to about 1,400 glass negatives of those images he crafted the old-fashioned way – with a box camera on a wooden tripod, doing all his focusing under the black drape, and – rather infamously – employing a pan of flash powder for lighting.

Terri Jo Ryan, professional writer and vice-chairperson of the Waco History Project, has long-admired the prolific photographer’s work, both as an amateur sleuth snooping into the city’s days gone by, but also in her professional capacity as an alumna of the Waco Tribune-Herald.

Welcome, Terri Jo

Terri Jo Ryan

Thank you, it’s great to be here.

Please tell us about Fred Gildersleeve.

WRITER (Terri Jo Ryan)

When I was writing anything about the years 1910 through the 1930s for the Brazos Past column, for example, finding a Gildersleeve or two to illustrate was an absolute requirement. His old business slogan, after all, was “Photographs tell the Story.”

Gildersleeve was everywhere in those days, He took pictures of people – famous or not; assemblies from May Fetes and church picnics to lynch mobs and Klan rallies. He snapped buildings, construction, art, agriculture, businesses, schools, ranching, advertising campaigns, Shriner parades, visiting circuses, sporting events, theatre productions, houses of worship, military installations, funerals, weddings, politicians, cowboys and Indians;streetcars, planes, trains and automobile – to name just a few of his subjects. Whew! He kept busy and seemed to have an insatiable curiosity for Wacopeople, places and happenings.

Most everyone who has lived in Waco for a while has either heard the Gildersleeve name or has seen at least one of his pictures, but most of us know little about the man behind the photos. When did Gildersleeve arrive in Waco and where was he originally from?

Gildy – as he was known by all – moved to Waco about 1905 on what he termed “a borrowed $10 bill” and established his own studio.

The spunky little shutterbug was born in June 1881 in Boulder, Colo. His family later moved to Kirksville, Mo., where he grew up. Before he received his first camera in 1898 – which was a box Kodak from his mother – the teenager was a race horse jockey at county fairs throughout the Show-Me State.

At the StateNormal School in Kirksville,Gildy used his Kodak to snap pictures of students. He developed them, printed them and sold them for 25 cents each – about equal to $6 in today’s currency. There was one hitch, though – he could only work on bright days because the printing was done by sunlight on solio paper.

Gildersleeve kept experimenting and learning. He went to photography school in Effingham,Ill., and worked a year and a half in Chicago. Between times, he somehow made the acquaintance of Theodore Roosevelt during the Spanish-American War.

Several years after that conflict, the story goes, Gildersleeve and his mother were in St. Louis when T. R. was there for a political rally.

“Look, Mother, there's Teddy,” exclaimed young Gildersleeve.

Mortified, his mother scolded, “Son, don't call him Teddy. That's Mr. Roosevelt.”
But Gildersleeveled her to the Rough Rider and introduced her. She was bowled over when she discovered the former President of the United States was an old pal of her boy.

I’ve heard Fred Gildersleeve often referred to as the “Matthew Brady of Waco.” Why is that?

Besides using the same kinds of photographic techniques and equipment as the Civil War Era- photographer, only 50 years later, Gildy was just as prolific in documenting his time and place. He loving and thoroughly chronicled the doings and beings of Waco for five decades.

Gildersleeve was the right man at the right time in Waco’s history, arriving just as the still young city was undertaking a building boom and bustling with civic boosterism.

Now that is what I call a mouthful of alliterations!

Waco was a city blessed with abundance of ambitious men of civic and commercial talents, architects like Roy E. Lane and Milton Scott. They were going places and took Gildy right along with them.

Waco had recently organized its Young Men’s Business League – a precursor of the Greater Waco Chamber of Commerce -- when Gildersleeve got to town, and he quickly ingratiated himself with the right people as one of the doers of the community. He was a supporter of civic activities and thus was invited to “shoot” more people, places and things in a city the size of Waco than most other photographers were.

He was known as the "Matthew Brady of Waco" – not only because he so thoroughly covered the people, places and events of greater Waco and its environs for half a century; but also because he favored much of the same equipment.

Gildy preferred a Brady-style box camera that he balanced on a wooden tripod, and pulling a black cloak over his head to do the focusing before pulling the trigger on a pan of flash powder. He was a most reluctant convert to flashbulbs, not employing them until the end of his professional shooting career in the 1950s.

Sounds kind of primitive, using 19th century technology for such a 20th century undertaking.

Gildy was a photographer of the old school, definitely. When he died in 1958, the Waco News-Tribuneeditorial noted that whenever he arrived on the scene to take a picture, considerable commotion commenced:

“When he touched off the explosive (flash powder), the light was perfect for a split second. But the surroundings were hidden by smoke for many minutes afterwards. In fact, when Gildy came to photograph a residential room, everyone cleared out ahead of time, sort of like they do today when the insect-fogging people come to treat a house.”

Incidentally, having Gildy come to shoot a commission or assignment around town must have been quite an event. He first tooled around to his work on a motorcycle with sidecar, toting his equipment or an apprentice with him. Later, his well-known Model T was a familiar sight around town.

Most Waco history books wouldn’t be complete with the image of the Prosperity Banquet. Tell us about that photograph.

His “personal best” – the image that made him nationally famous -- came early in his career here. In April 1911, an event known as the Victory Banquet or Prosperity Banquet was planned by the Young Men’s Business League to celebrate the construction of the Amicable Life Insurance Company building at Fifth Street and Austin Avenue. The 22-story structure was Texas’ first skyscraper and its tallest building. Known to most folks as the ALICO, the building was as much an emblem of Waco’s prosperous future as the Suspension Bridge over the Brazos was a symbol of its rugged past.

Gildersleeve was commissioned to document the gala affair, and with the help of assistants rigged flash powder charges above doorways along the block of Fifth Street between Austin and Franklin avenues, synchronized to ignite simultaneously. The illumination of thousands of faces in that instant at the height of the festivities made for the most sensational night photograph taken to that time in this country.The image was reproduced in publications all around the country, and Gildy got it belatedly copyrighted, but it gave him a name across America. He showed that kind of ingenuity time and again.

In what other ways was he an innovator in the photographic arts?

Well, in 1910, Gildy was hired by an Eastern syndicate to shoot pictures of plantation operations on an island off the Mexican coast, thus pioneering the field of industrial photography.

He took the first commercial aerial photographs in Texas, in 1914, by hanging half out of the cockpit of a plane flown by pilot Marion Sterling. Four years later, when the World War I army air base known as Rich Field was in operation, he was designated an honorary navigator by the military pilots. Gildy took great advantage of this position to experiment with aerial photography.

In fact, you could almost say Gildy was a pioneer documentarian of the nascent military-industrial complex. During the hectic days of World War I, 1917 through 1919, Waco was transformed by the arrival of CampMacArthur and Rich Field army air base. Gildy was there to provide a prolific record to officials in Washington and Waco, from the marathon building blitz to erect the airplane hangers and tent city, and the mundane scenes of the Doughboys’ daily lives, to the daring aerial shots of Waco landmarks, the small man with the big camera documented everything his lens could capture.

We know his pioneering and innovations continued for many years. Isn’t there a famous shot from the early 1900s of the CottonPalace?

Gildy’s greatest technical triumph came in a bit of characteristic Waco-centric community boosterism.

In 1916, Gildersleeve decided that he wanted to take one of his favorite shots – the TexasCottonPalace, an exhibition hall that operated in Wacofrom 1910 to 1930 – and enlarge it to the unheard of size of 10 feet across. He even constructed a large, shallow wooden trough to float his development chemicals in.

Instead of scoffing at such a notion, the folks at Eastman in Rochester, N.Y. bought into the dream, sending a technician down with a bolt of photographic paper to bring the great print to life – all 120 inches long of it. It was the world’s largest photographic print and Gildy gave his proud permission for the image to tour across the country. I’m sure city fathers were thrilled to have it touting one of Waco’s star attractions.

Wasn’t 1916 also the year Gildersleeve shot one of his most notorious sets of photographs? Can you shed some light on that?

Terribly shocking to modern sensibilities, but entirely in keeping with the sometimes savage times in which he worked, Gildersleeve was witness to one of the most infamous public lynchings in American history – an event called The Waco Horror.

On May 15, 1916, a mentally-retarded black farm hand named Jesse Washington was snatched from the courthouse by a vigilante mob minutes after he was convicted of raping and murdering a local white woman. The 17-year-old was castrated, tortured and hanged by a chain over a bonfire lit in the town square and burned alive as a crowd of about 15,000 people watched and cheered.

Neither the McLennanCountysheriff nor presiding judge did anything to stop the mob from dragging Washingtonaway. According to the newspaper accounts of the time, the mayor and police chief watched the gruesome spectacle from the mayor’s second-floor office, alongside Gildersleeve. As Waco's most successful commercial photographer, Gildy took pictures that he planned to sell as souvenir postcards.

The appalling brutality of this defining moment in the history of racial violence in America was captured powerfully by Gildersleeve, who vividly depicted the sea of straw boaters and dark derbies, cowboy hats and bowlers. Most chilling are those people looking right at the camera with smug satisfaction or smirks of delight at the spectacle.

Waco at the time fancied itself the “Athens of Texas” and the “City with a Soul” for the number of churches and colleges it had. But thanks to Gildersleeve’s haunting images, Waco became associated with barbaric behavior. Gildy shot it as just another “slice of life” in his adopted hometown, like a high school football game or a grade school pageant. The rest of the nation was aghast, of course.

Historian Patricia Bernstein in her book, The First Waco Horror, notes that these grisly photographs of a town’s populace torturing a black teen to death helped galvanize public opinion across the country against lynching as a way of maintaining social order. Although the act of taking the photos was “despicable,” she added, the photos themselves are an indelible legacy to Southern history. The irony of Gildersleeve’s career, she added, was that outside of Waco, these are the images he is most remembered for – not all the ragtime era portraits of handsome homes and bustling commerce.

In a surprisingly candid letter to W.E. B. Du Bois, editor-in-chief of the NAACP publication called The Crisis, Gildersleeve responded to questions about the lynching images: “We have quit selling the mob photos. This step was taken because our ‘city dads’ objected on the grounds of ‘bad publicity.’ As we want to be boosters and not knockers, we agreed to stop our sales.”

Was there anything else in your research into the life of Gildersleeve that surprised you?

Yes, frankly. I had never heard that at sometime in his early years, he’d lost a finger on his left hand in some accident. When asked about it, he claimed “Hypo ate it off.” Hypo, of course, was a chemical used in the photo developing process.

Also, the man was so antic during his long career, I wondered if he had ever settled down. There’s one Dallas Morning News profile on him that described him a “life-long bachelor.” But that wasn’t correct. Apparently a 30-year-long, childless marriage ended sometime in the 1940s, and that resulted not only in his great personal loss but a terrible blow to Waco history as well.

Sometime in the mid-1930s and through the 1940s, Gildy had switched from using glass plate negatives to celluloid or acetate negatives. After his marriage dissolved, those acetate negs ended up in the back alley trash bin, according to Roger Conger, the Waco historian who befriended Gildersleeve in the photographer’s waning years. The ex-wife regarded them as just so much rubbish, he said.

That missing collection of the mid-1930s and the 1940s included major athletic events and the coming to Waco of industrial giants like General Tireand Rubber Company; and Owens-Illinois Glass, as well as the local military installations of World War II.

Are you saying that most of his life’s work was lost in the divorce?

Almost all. And more of Gildersleeve’s legacy would have been lost if it weren’t for Conger’s intervention.

In his oral memoirs at the Texas Collection at BaylorUniversity, Conger said he wasonly a year old when he first met the photographer, as a babe-in-arms for a family photo in China Spring in 1911. The Congers great and small gathered inside or around his father’s first automobile, a 1910 Ford, for the Gildersleeve moment.
Conger saw him on a weekly basis in the 1940s, when both attended First Presbyterian Church of Waco. “He was in decline at that time,” Conger recalled.

During these years, Conger added, Gildy promised to give the glass negatives to himwhen he was “through with them.” One day Conger persuaded Gildy to let him at least have a peek at the negs. Conger reported that behind Gildersleeve’s Ethel Avenue home, in a “moldering little back yard shed,” and behind a rusty padlocked door they discovered a sickening sight: About half of the precious glass slides – at least two decades of Waco history – were in thousands of pieces upon the ground. Evidently the accumulated weight of the negatives was too heavy for the shelving and collapsed – perhaps years before – one upon another.

“I can recollect that Gildy stood there at the door, staring in stunned silence for several seconds,” Conger wrote for an alumni publication in the 1970s. “His reaction then would have to be described as a highly pungent outburst.” Although Gildy was tempted to just walk away from the tragic mess, Conger said, he was able to prevail upon Gildersleeve to let him try to salvage what he would. He worked several days carefully retrieving all the unbroken or only partially wrecked negatives. Many of them made an appearance in Conger’s 1964 Pictorial History of Waco.

Gildersleeve kept his word in his last will and testament, bequeathing the glass negatives – some 1,400 of them – to Conger. Conger, in turn, later gave them to The Texas Collection at BaylorUniversity.

Was Gildersleeve still shooting into the 1950s? That would have put him into his 70s.

Gildy had developed a cordial relationship with Jimmie Willis, the young photographer the 1940s who kept the Waco newspapers supplied with images, some in the mold of the old school Gildersleeve. Willis would help his mentor by developing prints of some of Gildersleeve’s few commissions.

That provided his cigarette money, Conger said. Gildy smoked Chesterfield cigarettes from a blackened silver holder.

In the 1950s, as Gildy’s health deteriorated, Conger stepped in as a caretaker of sorts. “I visited him almost daily and cut his hairand even shaved him. With the help of some church members, I arranged for his funeral, includinghis burial and a bronze marker for his grave.”