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. W. Parker Lyon, former mayor of Fresno and founder of the Lyon Van and Storage Company, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars assembling artifacts for his Pony Express Museum of Wild West Relics (AKA Pony Express Museum). The museum contained stagecoaches, the remnants of the first jail built in Northern California, part of the barbershop where Mark Twain got his hair cut, and thousands of other unique and historic artifacts and documents. The complex located at 1150 Kewen Drive in San Marino in 1930, moved to six acres of Lucky Baldwin's Estate in 1935. In 1954, after Lyon's death, his son liquidated the property located at 140 West Huntington Drive in Arcadia, selling the land to developers and the museum to William Harrah (of Harrah's in Reno) who vowed to keep the collection intact. In 1986 Greg Martin bought the Reno museum that refused to sell three guns he wanted, and put all the other artifacts up for auction. Train number seven, a wagon wheel and a western building housing the "greatest collection" are some of the things that can be seen at the Pony Express Museum in Pasadena. The phrase "Wild West Relics 78-19" is printed above the doorway.
Type
image
Format
1 photographic print :b&w ;11 x 15 cm. Photographic prints
If you're wondering about permissions and what you can do with this item, a good starting point is the "rights information" on this page. See our terms of use for more tips.
Share your story
Has Calisphere helped you advance your research, complete a project, or find something meaningful? We'd love to hear about it; please send us a message.
