The Green Album 1

It's time to put up another album.  Since each page has a number of images, I'll be returning to my usual practice of scanning the whole page  to show position, and then an individual scan of each individual photograph.  There are a lot of pages in this one, but most of them are blank.  Some of the pages have empty corners, or bits of glue and paper, and some of the blank pages are pristine.  Even though there aren't all that many pages with actual photographs, I may break up the way I post them, so, I'll label everything The Green Album so that they can all be brought up together.

None of the photos are labeled, so, once again it's conjecture time.  I bought this album from an eBay dealer in the mid-west.  It's been awhile, so my memory is a bit hazy on where exactly, but I do remember it was great plainsish.  Of course, photos and albums travel.  Sometimes with people as they move around the country, and sometimes, through the mail, from one friend or family member to another.

There's one thing we can be sure of, these beach side photos weren't taken around the great lakes.  Take a good look in the first photo.  There's a palm tree behind our lounging lady.  I've been all around Florida, and I don't remember any bluff side beaches, so I think California is a pretty good bet, but not near any of the cities.  Even when these were taken, Los Angeles, Long Beach, south bay, Orange County, and San Diego were all developed and crowded.  Perhaps a bit further north near Oxnard, Ventura, or Santa Barbara.

Another Hand Tinted Portrait

I've still got a few of these left, but this is going to the last I'll be posting for awhile.  Yes, the colors are really that bad on the original print.  

This Guy Looks Familiar

I'm a huge fan of old movies, and I'm sure I've seen some long forgotten character actor that looks just like this guy.  Anyway, before these vague memories from late night television entered my mind, I was going to write that I've never seen a hand tinted photo of a man that didn't look like he was wearing makeup, in this case, a light pink lipstick and a bit of blush.  Not a good look for a man.

Wings

I've written about this before.  I sometimes buy envelopes of old photographs, and it's fairly common to find one or two of these hand tinted images.  There not something I really look for, but I have them, and sometimes they are of interest.

What's kind of fascinating about this one is the wings she's wearing on her dress.  (Just below the neckline if it's difficult to find.)  She looks like someone who could be in her forties, from the World War 2 era, so maybe a son in the Army Air Corps, or a naval aviator.  Then again, her pin might be little more than something she found at the local five & dime.

Women In the Woods

I've done a lot of hiking and backpacking in my life and I don't think I've ever seen such well dressed women on a trail.  Sometimes, things do get better.

Dog Racing

I bet there's nothing people won't bet on.

Japanese Ladies

Some of you may be familiar with my Fair Use blog.  Over my many years of collecting old photographs, I've also ended up with more than a few non photographic bits of ephemera.  I had wanted to post them somewhere, but there weren't really enough examples to justify a separate blog.  As it so happens, I had also down loaded a fairly large number of images, from the internet, that I found fascinating.  In the end, I solved the growing problem of having too many things stored on my hard drive, and the whole what to do with the non photographic stuff by combining them on www.fairuse-wjy.blogspot.com.

This afternoon, I ran across a collection of paintings and one drawing by Estelle Peck Ishigo.  Since I made the decision that I didn't want to spend a lot of time typing up biographical information on the artists and photographers posted to Fair Use, and since I have this photo that is somewhat related, I'll do it here.

Estelle Peck was born in 1899 in Oakland, California.  Her mother, Bertha Apfels was an opera singer.  I wasn't able to find much about her, other than that she may have been German born, and that her career was limited, mostly, to the California stage.  Estelle's father was Bradford Peck, a portrait and landscape painter.  He wasn't a major American artist, but his work occasionally comes up for auction, and he is collected.  He was born in 1845 in New York and died in Los Angeles in 1921.  As a child, Estelle showed promise in both music and art.  She went to the Otis Art Institute.  In 1929, she met Arthur Shigeharu Ishigo, and aspiring actor who had a job at Paramount.  In 1929, inter racial marriage was illegal in California, so the young couple eloped to Mexico.  According to Wikipedia, she was disowned by her family.  After Pearl Harbor, her husband was arrested for no other crime than being of Japanese ancestry, and even though Estelle was exempt from being interred, she chose to accompany Arthur to the Heart Mountain Relocation  Camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming.  While there, she made paintings and drawing of her life at the camp.  After the war, she and Arthur returned to Los Angeles, where they worked for a fish canary.  Arthur died in 1957.  In 1972, Estelle published a book of her drawings.  She died in poverty, in 1990, just months before a documentary about her life and art was released.  Days of Waiting won the 1991 Academy Award for best documentary short subject.

Anyway, because the one woman in this snapshot appears to be wearing a kimono, I'm fairly certain they are Japanese.  Because I found it at an antique store in Los Angeles, I'd bet that it was taken in the United States.  If I'm right about all that, then it's almost certain these four ladies were sent to a relocation camp, and it's possible that they may have ended up at Heart Mountain, and if so, they probably met Estelle Peck Ishigo.