Ansel Adams

by Mary Street Alinder

  With enterprise, William almost at once established a lumber business, which he structured vertically, so that he owned timberlands, sawmills, and a fleet of ships. Quickly growing San Francisco clamored for this precious commodity. It seems especially ironic that the family wealth of a man who would one day become one of America’s greatest conservationists should have been based on what Ansel himself would later condemn as the rape of the land: the harvesting of virgin redwood forests.

  The 1870 San Francisco Directory listed an “Adams, Blinn & Co., lumber, and office Puget Sound Line Packets.”15 By this time, the successful William Adams had built Fair Oaks, a twenty-three-room home on fifty-four acres in the countryside of Menlo Park, thirty miles south of the big city.16 The 1886 directory listed “William J. Adams” in large type, and then, below the name, offered: “lumber dealer and shipping merchant and proprietor Washington Mills (Seabeck), office Pier 17, Steuart, res. Menlo Park.”17

  Not confining his business to lumber, William also purchased significant real estate in the city’s downtown. San Francisco’s streets were crisscrossed by privately built streetcars that provided transportation across the expanding city;18 William acquired a franchise and built one of the city’s major lines, the Ferries and Cliff Cable Car Road.19

  William and Cassandra had five children—three daughters and two sons. When the elder son, William, refused to join his father’s business, choosing instead to practice medicine, it was left to Charles Hitchcock Adams, the youngest child, born in 1868, to assume that role. As the times dictated, the three daughters—Cassandra, Sarah, and Olive—were never considered; their lots were to be placed in solid marriages with undiluted allegiance to their husbands.20

  Charles was the good son. Endowed with a sensitive soul and an intellect that was captured by the sciences, especially astronomy, he entered the University of California, Berkeley, in 1886, completing only two years of study before his father summoned him to his future. Sentenced to an unhappy life of business to which he was totally unsuited, Charles would suffer disastrous consequences. He had one grand adventure—in 1891 he accompanied his mother on a European vacation.

  Charles enjoyed prospecting in Nevada as a sometime-hobby. Perhaps on such a trip he met Olive Bray, a confident and well-liked woman from Carson City. Ollie and her younger sister Mary were members of the Browning Society, which obliged them to spend certain evenings reading aloud the verse of that famous and romantic couple Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Ollie played the piano, was an accomplished painter of china, and, to round out her skills, could drive a team of horses. She must have been quite adventurous compared to most of the women Charles knew. From their letters, it does seem to have been a true love match, and they wed in 1896. He was twenty-eight years old and she thirty-four. 21

  Carson City, Nevada, was then a rural small town of the Old West that offered a stark contrast to the sophisticated city of San Francisco. Ollie’s father, Charles Bray, had headed west from his home in Baltimore to seek his fortune. At some point on his journey he met Ohio-born Nan Hiler, ten years his junior. They were married in 1861 in Iowa, where Ollie was born the next year and her sister, Mary, three years later.22 The young family joined a wagon train and arrived in Nevada by 1864, soon settling in Carson City, where Bray established a livery stable and drayage company to haul goods.23 Due to repeated unsound investments, the Brays were genteelly impoverished.24 Her sister, Mary, had unfortunately fallen in love with the local doctor, a married man who stayed with his wife. Mary never recovered to love another; she became a living stereotype of the lonely spinster, a woman of quiet temperament, assigned the drudgery of bookkeeping for their father.25

  Olive and Charles’s only child, Ansel Easton Adams, was born late in the day on Thursday, February 20, 1902, in his parents’ rented flat at 114 Maple, in the upper-middle-class San Francisco neighborhood called the Western Addition.26 He was named for his uncle, Ansel Easton, who had married Charlie’s sister, Sarah, and who had been Charlie’s best man. Little Ansel, unable to pronounce “Charlie,” christened his dad “Carlie,” and Carlie joined Charlie as his second nickname. Ansel’s birth was the single most wondrous event of Carlie Adams’s life, and he seemed always to be aware of that, treasuring his son with a steady tenderness. Charlie affectionately called his son Ants, and Ansel called him Pop.27

  Charlie was determined that his son would grow up in a healthier environment than San Francisco, with its filthy air polluted by the smoke of soft coal mixed with fog. A little more than five miles west of his downtown office, he purchased three contiguous lots on Twenty-fourth Avenue, each one twenty-five feet wide, for nine hundred dollars.28 They were nothing more than sand dunes, but they afforded a splendid view of the Golden Gate and, across the straits, the distant Marin headlands. With wood from the family lumber mills, he built a solid, two-storied, shingled and stuccoed house protected by gardens on either side.

  The Adamses moved in on April 2, 1903.29 In the front yard, Charlie planted a Norfolk Island pine, their Christmas tree that towered over the neighborhood for many years.30 Charlie neglected to purchase the one remaining lot to the north, so convinced was he that a house would never be allowed on its unsubstantial ground. Not for the last time, he was apparently wrong: before long, the lot was sold, a house was built, and much of their panoramic view disappeared.31

  Nearby, Lobos Creek flowed northward past the Adams house on its way to the Pacific. The creek became Ansel’s secret fort. He explored every inch and came to know intimately its nooks and crannies. He marveled at its residents—beetles, butterflies, pollywogs, and frogs—and assembled meticulous displays of bugs impaled on pins while his parents collected the wildflowers that grew on the banks, to use as specimens for Ollie’s china painting.

  As Ansel grew older, his world expanded to include Baker Beach, a half mile away at the foot of Lobos Creek, and the sea cliffs that stretched west to Land’s End. With easy agility, he scampered up and down the crumbling bluffs, scouring the shore for driftwood that he proudly bore home for the fireplace. He loved to watch the fog drift in and out, modulating the sun’s light. Weekends were often spent with the senior Adamses at Fair Oaks, while vacations were enjoyed at a friend’s mountain retreat in the redwoods above Santa Cruz.32

  Ansel was a lonely child, more comfortable with adults than with others his own age.33 He made few friends. He looked rather like a skinny squirrel, with eyes that bulged a bit and ears that stuck out. These features, combined with his twisted nose and open mouth—whether for breathing or to allow for his almost constant chatter—made him seem strange to other children.

  Ansel had to be in motion at all times; otherwise he would twitch with frustration, his mind flitting along with his body. He had no patience for games, although he did briefly attempt roller skating and golf.34 Today he would probably be diagnosed as ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder); back then he was seen as a significant behavior problem.

  For a time, the family business, Washington Mills, had been perhaps the most successful lumber company in San Francisco, and William himself regarded as the “Grand Old Man of the Lumber Industry.”35 But William did not believe in insurance, and not long after Charlie and Ollie’s marriage, the business suffered a decline brought on by a succession of fires and shipwrecks. Undocumented reports put the total loss at twenty-seven ships and six sawmills.36 At least this is the version of the story that Charlie told Ansel’s early biographer, Nancy Newhall, when she interviewed him before his death, in 1951, and that she then recounted in her 1963 biography of Ansel’s early years, The Eloquent Light. Ever the gentleman, Charlie may have preferred this “Act of God” script, complete with its biblical-style disasters, to a recitation of his family’s loss by less dramatic means.

  In a contradictory 1947 interview, Charlie remembered that their fortune had been lost due to the financial depressions of 1897 and 1907.37 In October 1907, a worldwide financial panic led to a stock-market crash and serious runs
on banks, triggering early demands for the repayment of loans.38 William was heavily mortgaged, thanks in part to the great earthquake and fire of a year earlier in which his San Francisco offices had burned to the ground.39

  When the seventy-eight-year-old William died, on August 2, 1907, Charlie was left with little money, large mortgages on the few remaining properties, and a resolve to maintain the family honor. To compound his problems, Ollie’s sister, Mary (then forty-two), and father, Charles (then seventy-two), both penniless, came to live with them, staying until their own deaths, his on December 29, 1919, and hers on August 1, 1944.40

  By all accounts (including his own), Charlie was no businessman. By 1911, the family holdings were reduced to one mill site, at Hadlock, Washington, on Puget Sound. He journeyed there, accompanied by nine-year-old Ansel, to establish the Classen Chemical Company. While Charlie worked, Ansel had a great time clamming, crabbing, and playing with baby chicks that ate out of his hand.41

  As a boy, Charlie, too, had traveled with his father to visit their lumber mills, where he had become intrigued by the mountains of sawdust and challenged himself to figure out a commercial outlet for the stuff. Later, while studying chemistry at the University of California, he devised a method for making 200-proof, industrial-quality alcohol from sawdust and was said to have been granted a patent for the process in 1887.42 Ingeniously, he had also found a way to mix the cellulose by-product with a variety of nutrients to serve as an additive to cattle fodder.

  On his 1911 trip to Hadlock, with sawdust still cheap and abundant, Charlie was determined to make a success of his patent. To finance this venture, he had formed a partnership with his attorney, George Wright, and Ansel Easton, a man of independent means.

  The processing of sugarcane could produce industrial-quality alcohol. When Classen began successful manufacture with its rival process, a group of threatened Hawaiian sugar interests purchased a majority share in the company, buying out both Easton and Wright. Quickly, the new controlling owners fired the Classen staff and, as Ansel remembered it, physically ruined the factory.43 In a cruel twist, Charlie was left holding 46 percent of the now-worthless stock, devastated emotionally and financially, betrayed by his brother-in-law and his attorney. Knowledge of his uncle’s treachery was kept hidden from Ansel, although for a time Charlie couldn’t bear to call his son by his name but instead called him Tad. It was not until 1932 that Ansel finally learned of the betrayal.44 Until that point, he had always gone by his full name, Ansel Easton Adams, but from then on he no longer used his middle name, first calling himself Ansel E. Adams and then, by 1934, banishing “Easton” and its initial E forevermore.

  Years later Ansel would recall, “I guess I was about twelve or thirteen when it happened. Well, I knew something had happened, because we went from [having] a cook and a maid and a governess to doing it all [ourselves]!”45 Ollie and Aunt Mary now shared the cooking responsibilities, becoming quite adept, even to the extent of mastering the art of making mayonnaise with a strong arm and a good whisk.46

  Charlie had to find a job. From about 1912, he worked for five years as a traveling salesman for the West Coast Life Insurance Company, a discouraging and exhausting occupation. Some days he covered a route of twenty miles, with few contracts, if any, to show for it at day’s end.47

  Eventually he found more solid employment as the secretary of San Francisco’s Merchants’ Exchange, a position he retained from 1917 to 1940. Throughout these uniformly trying years, Charlie faithfully returned daily to 129 Twenty-fourth Avenue to be greeted by his adoring son. Ollie proved to be a stern and critical woman whose condemnation of her husband only accelerated as the years and his failures progressed. The addition of a commiserating Aunt Mary and a stern Grandfather Charles made for a grim household indeed.

  Astronomy became Charlie’s release from his daily worries. He acquired a three-inch telescope and delighted in slowly scanning the heavens each fogless night. He included Ansel in his hobby, and together they traveled to Mount Hamilton’s Lick Observatory, southeast of San Jose, for serious viewing. Charlie joined the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and served as its secretary-treasurer for twenty-five years, from 1925 to 1950, for which office he received a salary of one hundred dollars a month. He became one of the most valued members in the history of the organization.48

  On one issue, Charlie stood firm: he was adamant that Ansel should not suffer the same life he had. Whereas Charlie himself had been required to serve the family, he encouraged Ansel to explore a greater variety of life’s possibilities, unencumbered by many traditional expectations. Money was tight, but Charlie saw to it that there would always be enough for his beloved son.

  Until Ansel was nine, Charlie and Aunt Mary shared responsibility for his home schooling. Ansel always loved books; at first his doting father read to him, and then, at a very young age, Ansel learned to read for himself. He enjoyed Brett Harte and Washington Irving. When he was eight, his Aunt Mary gave him The Children’s Plutarch, a multivolume series that included Tales of the Greeks and Tales of the Romans.49 He became enthralled by the stories of Alexander, Pericles, Alcibiades, Demosthenes, Antony, Caesar, and Brutus.50 These were role models to guide a young mind in a heroic direction.

  Although Ansel was raised under nineteenth-century strictures of modesty and decorum, his upbringing was nonetheless invested with a liberal dose of humanism. His parents’ approach to child rearing was influenced by the views of Herbert Spencer, whose book on the subject was the only one that was kept through the years by the family. The Dr. T. Berry Brazelton of his day, Spencer stressed the importance of a balanced life, physical as well as mental, for the optimal development of the child.

  Charlie and Ollie did not belong to a church; Ansel later recalled fondly that he had been raised a “heathen.”51 Charlie embraced the ideals espoused by his spiritual mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, by living a life close to nature. Emerson, who died in 1882, presented a philosophy that combined European romanticism with American pragmatism, developed during the tough establishment of a new country. He popularized the concept of transcendentalism, the belief that all living creatures are linked to a universal soul.52

  As a Unitarian minister, Emerson celebrated the importance of the individual, suggesting that man might interface directly with God, without the need for formalized religion or its anointed personnel. Emerson proposed that religion—indeed, all experience—was meaningful only on a personal level; since each person was unique, individualism and nonconformity were, he believed, the normal order of things. He demonstrated, both through his writing and by his example, the responsibility and power of an independent person to act consciously and morally.53

  Emerson’s teachings resonated with Charlie, who read his books into thumb-worn condition.54 Charlie’s first commandment would have read, “Live each day bound by the highest moral standards as exemplified by the natural world.” Charlie molded his son into a direct expression of Emersonian ideals, raised above all to adore nature, the straightest path to the eternal. Emerson’s doctrine of social responsibility was manifested in Charlie’s adherence to the old frontier tradition of passing along whatever he learned that might be of benefit to others, a virtue that would prove an important tenet in his son’s life as well.

  During the years when Charlie worked as a traveling salesman, Aunt Mary was in charge of her nephew’s education. She was a follower of Robert Green Ingersoll, a writer, lecturer, and “famous agnostic” who held that there was “no darkness but ignorance.”55 Aunt Mary owned a well-read copy of Ingersoll’s The Ghosts and Other Lectures,56 to the inside of which she had permanently attached a lengthy newspaper clipping with excerpts from a speech delivered by Ingersoll on April 12, 1896, at the Militant Church in Chicago. He preached,

  The firmament inlaid with suns is the real cathedral. The interpreters of nature are the true and only priests . . . Let us flood the world with intellectual light.57

  The sentiment expressed in these lines,
echoing his father’s ideology, served as a foundation for all of Ansel’s beliefs. He would spend his life translating this philosophy, a combination of Emerson and Ingersoll (with the later additions of Edward Carpenter and a dash of Elbert Hubbard), through the prisms of his own experience and vision.

  In 1911, Ansel was finally enrolled in the neighborhood Rochambeau School. Whenever he had to sit in the classroom, he would fidget, yearning to be set loose in the wonderful outdoors. When questioned by his teachers, he often gave inappropriate responses punctuated by hysterical laughter. Rochambeau was judged unsuitable, and there followed a succession of private schools, each of which Ansel was eventually asked to leave due to his inattention and misbehavior.

  Extremely unhappy, Ansel grew emotionally unstable and cried easily. The family doctor advised that he spend two hours every afternoon in his darkened bedroom to quiet his nerves, but the nature-loving boy could not tolerate this remedy.58 School, too, stood in sharp contrast to his chosen world of Lobos Creek. In the classroom he felt enchained. Education based on rote memorization seemed senseless to Ansel, who had already found consequential meaning in the natural world all about him.