Ansel Adams (2 page)

At about this same time, Jim was offered a job that he truly wanted, as executive director of the aforementioned Friends of Photography, with Ansel as president and chairman of the board of trustees. Lincoln was an idyllic city in which to raise three small children, but we were ready for a big change, if not for the shock of Carmel housing prices. I immediately found a job at the local hospital, working the night shift in the maternity area.

Jim thrived at the Friends. From the beginning, he and Ansel were comfortable with each other and worked well together. Over the course of a steady succession of social occasions, Ansel and I became much better acquainted. After a year, I resigned from the hospital to accept a position as manager of the Weston Gallery in Carmel, where I learned a great deal about the business of photography and happily also saw firsthand the extraordinary qualities of original prints by Edward and Ansel and many others. As good as that job was, when Ansel asked me to direct his staff, in 1979, I jumped at the opportunity.

Ansel hired me for a number of reasons, the first being that we got along so well. Second, I was knowledgeable about photography, both its aesthetics and history, and possessed the finely honed organizational skills of a working mother. Third, he was curious about all things medical; during my year at the hospital, it was not unusual for him to stop by my area for a chat. In me, he now had a personal nurse. Fourth, my avocation is serious cooking, and Ansel’s was eating. Finally, and most important, Ansel had not yet written one word of his autobiography, although his 1978 deadline had come and gone. With my background as an editor and writer, I was to “make Ansel write his autobiography.” And I did.

It is a shock to me that Ansel died thirty years ago. It seems like forever, but his presence is still strong in my consciousness and my life. His example is always before me. Since this book was first published, eighteen years ago, of course I have learned more, made some wonderful discoveries, and new events have happened, enough to significantly enrich this new edition. Over time I have come to a few different conclusions about the impact of people’s actions in Ansel’s life and afterwards. I believe I have now a greater balance of vision, understanding that the legacy Ansel left us through the example of his life and the concrete expressions of his soul in his photographs is where we should dwell and what will endure.

Mary Street Alinder

June 2014

Chapter 1: San Francisco

It began with a low, faraway rumble, as if a thunderstorm were brewing in the distance. At first the house gently trembled, its shaking increasing with the tempo of the earth. Four-year-old Ansel Adams jerked awake as his small bed was buffeted from wall to wall; Nellie, his nanny, grabbed the bed and held it to her own.
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The bedroom’s west-facing window burst into fragments. A deafening noise smothered the senses as the great earthquake laid claim to San Francisco at 5:12:05
a.m.
on Wednesday, April 18, 1906.
2

After seventy-five seconds of terror, it stopped. The violent release of pent-up pressure caused by the colliding North American and Pacific tectonic plates had displaced the earth from nine to twenty-one feet, with a force measuring 8.25 on the Richter scale, probably the largest quake ever to hit California.
3
San Francisco was in shambles and afire within minutes thanks to exploding gas mains.
4
Although firm numbers have never been established, between five hundred and three thousand people are thought to have died.

Nellie led Ansel by the hand across the second-floor hallway to his parents’ bedroom, where they found his mother, Olive, sitting straight up in bed, her eyes riveted on the new view of the Golden Gate afforded by the absent fireplace. Its bricks had shattered her husband’s new greenhouse below. Ansel’s father, Charles, was in Washington, D.C., on business.

Olive pulled herself together and surveyed the wreckage. She found they had been very lucky. Although most breakables had broken, her jars of canned fruits, vegetables, pickles, and preserves were all intact, still sitting in the cellar in neat rows. Olive toted up the damage: one chimney missing, two fireplaces and the greenhouse lost, the plaster walls riddled with cracks, and woodwork hanging wildly from walls.
5
At first inspection the house seemed structurally sound, but in fact its foundation had been damaged.
6
Kong, the family’s Chinese cook, had suffered a concussion; dazed, he started lighting a fire in the ruined fireplace, which could have burned the house down if Olive had not stopped him just in time.
7

Olive Adams was a woman devoted to order and routine. The first task, she determined, would be to make breakfast. The kitchen stove was carried outside, wood was lighted, and a small hold on normalcy was regained.

The strongest aftershock hit at 8:14:28
a.m.,
when Ansel was playing in the garden. The earth flung his small body skyward, and gravity then dashed it face-first into a low wall, breaking his nose bloodily to the left (a political tendency Ansel would affirm to his last days). When the family doctor finally arrived, he advised Olive that it would be best to wait until the boy matured before setting his nose. The quake instantly rendered Ansel a mouth breather, his face forever slightly asymmetrical—a condition that he later playfully claimed became permanent simply because he never
did
mature.

In 1906, San Francisco had a population of 410,000, making it the largest city in the American West. The earthquake and the firestorm that followed it inflicted damage estimated at between 350 million and one billion dollars, plunging the city into an immediate economic depression. A huge portion of the population was left homeless. Two hundred thousand took shelter in Golden Gate Park alone, one mile south of the Adams home; another refugee camp was based in the forested Presidio, the military post just north of them. The Adamses’ house provided temporary shelter for more family members and friends than it could hold, and their camps spilled out across the neighboring dunes.
8

San Francisco burned for three full days. With a sense of wonder, Ansel observed the curtain of smoke far to the east and the stream of newly homeless people carrying their remaining possessions. As night descended, the view shifted to walls of distant flame. The fire’s progress was finally halted at seven o’clock on Saturday morning, April 21, little more than three miles away from the Adamses’.
9
Years later, Ansel recalled that the earthquake and fire constituted his closest experience with acute human tragedy, even though he was at a safe remove from the cataclysm.
10

Only small amounts of accurate news, and masses of inaccurate bulletins, reached the East Coast and the ears of Charles Adams. Some reports had San Francisco in total ruin and in addition hit by a tidal wave. Charles Adams boarded the first train west, changed in Chicago, and kept on going. When the train stopped in Reno, the stationmaster handed out letters and telegrams addressed to the worried passengers, including one from Olive’s father assuring Charles that the rest of the family was all right.
11
He traveled from Oakland across the San Francisco Bay by ferry, arriving in the city on Monday, April 23, five days after the earthquake. Acquiring a pass that allowed him to move through the devastation, he walked across the city to a joyous homecoming, finding his family safe and his home nearly intact.
12

Charles’s father, William James Adams, had arrived in San Francisco in 1850 at the age of twenty-one from his home in Thomaston, Maine, soon after learning of the California Gold Rush.
13
After an unsuccessful try at mining, he put his entrepreneurial mind to work and decided that he could make money supplying the other miners. He opened a wholesale grocery in Sacramento, and was a man of affluence by the time he sold it, in 1856. He returned home to Maine to find a wife, settling on a wealthy young widow named Cassandra Hills McIntyre, who at just twenty years old was proudly possessed of luxuriant, dark, curly locks. The next year, in 1857, the couple boarded a ship bound for their new home in San Francisco; by taking the ocean route, William hoped to spare his bride the dangers of a cross-continental trip. Instead, when they journeyed over the Isthmus of Panama, she caught Chagas’ disease (caused by a tropical parasite) and permanently lost her beautiful hair.
14
Cassandra must have truly wondered what she had got herself into when they arrived in San Francisco and found that it had just been struck by a particularly violent earthquake (not, however, as large as the one to come in 1906; the city was already optimistically rebuilding).

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