Treasures of The Texas Collection
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 oldfashioned 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.”
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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 Waco people, 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 State Normal 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 SpanishAmerican 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.
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Mortified, his mother scolded, “Son, don't call him Teddy. That's Mr. Roosevelt.”
But Gildersleeve led 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.
Gildersleeve 4
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-Tribune editorial 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,
Gildersleeve 5
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 Camp MacArthur 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 Cotton Palace?
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
Texas Cotton Palace, an exhibition hall that operated in Waco from 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
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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 McLennan County sheriff nor presiding judge did anything to stop the
mob from dragging Washington away. 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.
Gildersleeve 7
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 “lifelong 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 Tire and Rubber
Gildersleeve 8
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 Baylor University, Conger said he
was only 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
him when 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 Baylor University.
Gildersleeve 9
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 hair and even shaved him. With the
help of some church members, I arranged for his funeral, including his burial and a
bronze marker for his grave.”
Fred Gildersleeve died on Feb. 26, 1958, and was buried at Waco Memorial Park.
Given his place, time and occupation, I imagine Gildersleeve got to rub elbows
with some of the notables of the era.
Indeed, he photographed many of the celebrities of his day, such as the evangelist
Billy Sunday, presidential contender Al Smith at the 1928 Democratic Convention
in Houston, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge; William Howard
Taft in Dallas in 1909 after Gildy was named the official photographer of the State
Fair of Texas.
What I find so interesting is that Gildersleeve apparently had little regard for
history, per se. Conger said Gildy wasn’t a student of local history as much an
unwitting chronicler of it. He came to recognize the role he had played as a
documentarian in his latter years, when people would come to buy prints of
yesteryear such as one of pioneer aviator Cal Rodgers circling the Amicable
building after its completion in 1911. Rodgers was making the first coast-to-coast
air journey that fall, sponsored by a grape soda company making Vin Fizz, and
became a national celebrity. Rodgers died the following spring off the California
coast when he crashed into a flock of birds during an exhibition flight.
Gildersleeve 10
Gildersleeve was also the official photographer for the Baylor University football
team for decades. The story goes that even when he wasn’t shooting the team
anymore in the 1950s, he still liked to haunt the sidelines of the field to watch the
Bears in action. One time, a crush of the big bruisers came rumbling up the field
and mowed him down in their haste. As younger photographers scrambled to help
the little old man to his feet, he was heard to snarl: “Go away. I’m not hurt.
Football players have been running over me on the sidelines before you were
born!”
Although a hard-worker and prolific photographer, Gildy was no Spartan, Conger
said. “He was a high-strung, complaining sort of man,” Conger added. “In his later
years, he was rather bitter.” Conger said he tried to be patient and compassionate in
this sad period of failing health out of respect for the image-maker’s former service
to his community.
After studying the deep collection of Gildersleeve materials in The Texas
Collection, you must have come across some favorite Gildersleeve stories. Are
there any that you personally would like to share?
A few, yes. The first one comes from the oral memoirs of Elizabeth Luck Simpson,
a Trib reporter of the Great Depression years.
One of her earliest assignments was with Gildy, she recalled: About 1930, when
she was a young reporter no more than 21 years old, the police reported on a
murder-suicide in one of the small communities about 15 miles from Waco. The
police wanted Gildy to come shoot the crime scene for them, and Gildy offered to
take Simpson along.
“We loaded up his old car and all of the heavy, unwieldy equipment in the back
and dashed out there at about 35 miles per hour and I got my story,” she said. She
had to muster a lot of self-control because it was her first such exposure to this
seamy side of the news biz, “and I was determined I was not gonna turn sissy.”
She continued: “So we dashed back after Gildy had taken I don’t know how many
pictures, from every angle – the bodies, the room, everything – and I wrote my
story. Then Gildy called and said something had happened to his camera and he
didn’t get a single print! Well, it just shows that even a good photographer – and he
was – can really make a boo-boo at times. I think his embarrassment was so great
that he never really like to go on assignment with me anymore.”
Gildersleeve 11
Simpson’s reminiscences note that although Gildersleeve was a staff reporter
himself for a time for the papers, he much preferred the freelance route, which
allowed him to pursue other work – like taking family portraits, documenting
church picnics, weddings and other social affairs of Waco life.
The other local legend of Gildersleeve lore that was repeated for years also took
place during the Great Depression, during a state ceremonial occasion for the
Shriners.
Some 2,500 Shiners visited the old Cotton Palace coliseum. The old coliseum had
fallen out of regular use for several years because the Cotton Palace Exposition
went under with the economic collapse and there wasn't much demand for the vast
old hall. Bats, owls and a large flock of pigeons had made the rafters their roost.
Dust, debris and droppings were thick amid the lofty perch.
Shrine potentates had asked Gildy to photograph the grand banquet of the
assembly one night in the Coliseum. Gildy and a local electrician worked all that
day setting up the flash powder guns high around the Coliseum walls so that when
the photographer pulled the trigger, his own flash powder would go off
simultaneously with that in the extra trays around the huge room to create an even,
bright light.
Gildy set up his largest flash powder gun on the Coliseum stage and fixed his
camera on the tripod. The Shriners in their finest settled in their chairs, waiting for
the image to be struck. Gildy looked under his black-hooded camera, focused the
image, braced himself and pulled the trigger.
WHOOO-O-O-O-OOM!
The flash shattered glass in scores of the upper widows and clattered down, along
with a rain of droppings and feathers. The entire Coliseum was enveloped with a
fog of powder, smoke and dust.
Gildy and his electrician friend scooped up their paraphernalia and ducked out the
back door of the stage, before the smoke could clear and the audience regained
their vision. Reportedly, he hid for days after the fiasco, but was forgiven when the
potentates -- after the shock had worn off somewhat -- liked the crystal clear image
Gildersleeve 12
he captured a half-second before the shower of debris fell on their formal wear and
their dinner plates.
I would love to see that photo someday.
Did he ever take uncommisioned photos – perhaps for charities or just for the
sake of Art?
I haven’t been able to find any records that he donated his work to nonprofit
organizations, for example. But he did collect shots that clearly were not
commissioned.
Kent Keeth, the former director of the Texas Collection, said in a 1997 interview
with the Tribune-Herald that “a lot of times (Gildersleeve) would take his camera
out and say, ‘Hey, that looks interesting,’ and take a picture of it.”
With the volume of Gildersleeve work available, it sounds like there was
enough material to fill a museum. Was there ever talk of creating a specific
museum for his work?
There were plans for a time in the mid-1990s for the Sanger Heights neighborhood
to turn Gildersleeve’s dilapidated old home at 2219 Ethel Avenue into a
Gildersleeve Museum or similar historical structure. But when various funding
plans failed to materialize, the ruins were eventually sold to Neighborworks Waco,
which tore down the structure in July 2001. On the spot and the lot next door, 2215
Ethel Avenue, where the home of osteopathic physician J. Ellen Gildersleeve once
stood, Neighborworks erected two homes in the architectural style of the original
structures and named them for the Gildersleeve siblings. Those homes sold in
2003.
To view some of the tremendous volume of Fred Gildersleeve images at the
Texas Collection on the Baylor campus, or to read newspaper and term
papers about his life and accomplishments, visit the collection at The Carroll
Library.
Property of The Texas Collection at Baylor University
Final Edit: January 9, 2010
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_________________________________________________
Terri Jo Ryan, Writer
_________________________________________________
Dr. Mary Landon Darden, Executive Producer
_________________________________________________
Pattie Orr, Vice President of Information Technology and Dean of
University Libraries
_________________________________________________
John Wilson, Associate Director of The Texas Collection
_________________________________________________
Dr. Thomas L. Charlton, Director of The Texas Collection