Title supplied by cataloger.; Herman J. Schultheis was born in Aachen, Germany in 1900, and immigrated to the United States in the mid-1920s after obtaining a Ph.D. in mechanical and electrical engineering. He married Ethel Wisloh in 1936, and the pair moved to Los Angeles the following year. He worked in the film industry from the late 1930s to the mid-1940s, most notably on the animated features Fantasia and Pinocchio. His detailed notebook, documenting the special effects for Fantasia, is the subject of a 14-minute short-subject included on the film's DVD. In 1949, he started employment with Librascope as a patent engineer. Schultheis was an avid amateur photographer who traveled the world with his cameras. It was on one of these photographic exhibitions in 1955 that he disappeared in the jungles of Guatemala. His remains were discovered 18 months later. The digitized portion of this collection represents the images Schultheis took of Los Angeles and its surrounding communities after he relocated to the area in 1937. Originally an alluvial river that ran freely across a flood plain, the Los Angeles River's 51-mile path was unstable and unpredictable with the mouth of the river moving frequently from one place to the other. In March of 1938 there was a great storm that flooded one third of the city of Los Angeles killing 115 people. Later that year, due to public outcry, the Army Corps of Engineers began the 20 year project to create the permanent concrete channel which still contains most of the of riverbed today. A house hangs precipitously over the Los Angeles River, while a group of men downstream work to dig something out of the river bank, possibly a house that wasn't as lucky. Although Schultheis calls this North Hollywood, it might be the area where 10 houses washed into the river in Toluca Lake at the same time that the Lankershim Bridge collapsed, because that area was called North Hollywood in the contemporary papers.
Type
image
Format
1 photographic print :b&w ;11 x 15 cm. Photographic prints
Floods--California--Los Angeles Flood damage--California--Los Angeles Natural disasters--California--Los Angeles County Landslides--California--Los Angeles Dwellings--California--North Hollywood (Los Angeles) Building failures--California--Los Angeles Digging--California--Los Angeles Rescue work--California--Los Angeles Rivers--California, Southern Los Angeles River (Calif.) North Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.) Schultheis Collection photographs
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