Studio De Luxe

By Eilene Lyon

Found Photo Project #11

As happened with young Dorothy Beaty, this found photo project revealed that the person behind the camera had the most fascinating story of all. That’s not to say the subjects in front of the camera are not worthy of their own spot in the limelight.

The Smith Siblings

This pair of portraits came from the nearby Gem Village antique store, where I found the compelling portrait of actor David R. Young. These two images had identical studio folios. Each had only a first name written in the margin: Elva and Gil. The photographer’s imprint “Studio De Luxe” placed the location of the portraits in Pueblo, Colorado.

I deduced a couple things:

• The subjects were both in their teens and likely siblings
• The apparel and other clues put the photo date in the 1920s

It took a few tries, but I found a census record that supported these deductions. In 1920, Ada Smith, a divorced farm manager, was living in Sitton, Pueblo County, Colorado, with two children: Elva, age 11; Gilbert, age 8.¹ Further research on Ancestry provided evidence that I had the correct people. I also found a portrait of Ada with her two children posted on Find A Grave.

Ada’s ex-husband was a baker from Kansas City, Missouri. Probably not long after these portraits were done, Elva and Gil went to live with their father and his second wife, Arthur and Edith Smith.² Elva married Thomas Bolen Williams (an electrical engineer) in Kansas City in 1931.³ They had two sons and the family relocated to Ouray, Colorado, by 1950.⁴ Elva and Thomas both died in the Denver area in the mid-1980s.

I have a good deal more information about Gil, though it comes from an obituary and I have not been able to verify much.⁵ Gil graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute in the 1930s. In 1940, he sailed by steamship to Skagway, Alaska, and paddled a homemade kayak to the Chilkoot Inlet and settled on a small homestead (about 5 acres) near Haines.

To earn money, Gil worked as a truck driver and painted signs, but his real profession was landscape art. He worked primarily in oils and watercolor and is believed to have completed more than 3,000 images of the stunning scenery that surrounded him in southeastern Alaska. His work was highly esteemed and well-known in his home state. The obituary notes some of his achievements:

• Display at the Smithsonian Institute
• Hung in the Alaska delegation offices in Washington, DC
• Featured on the cover of the Ford Motor Company’s Ford Times magazine

In 1988, Gil suffered a serious stroke and became partially paralyzed. He moved with his partner, Janis Marston, to Glendale, New Mexico. He developed a shading technique to draw wildlife with his left hand. He passed away in Las Cruces in 2000.⁶ He was 88 years old.

Frank D. Muramoto of Studio De Lux

To my delight, I found an extensive article online about Frank Denichi Muramoto, a Japanese immigrant from the first wave to arrive in America.⁷ He was born in 1884 and came to America in 1903. One reason for the rising Japanese migration was the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Mines and railroads still valued Asian labor, despite the law.

Frank spent his early years in the states working for the Union Pacific Railroad, mining, and in the sugar beet fields of Colorado. He moved around the west with the employment opportunities. In 1911 he attended the 9-month program at the Illinois College of Photography in Effingham.

After his graduation, he took a job as a “houseboy” near Spring Green, Wisconsin. His employer? Frank Lloyd Wright, who was at the time constructing his studio, Taliesin. It was a short-term position for Frank, who soon moved to Pueblo to begin his career as a photographer. Aside from a trip to Japan to marry Asako Muruyama in 1915, Frank spent the remainder of his life in Pueblo, where he died of a heart attack in 1958 at age 73.

Pueblo had a growing Japanese population in the early 20^th century. Frank partnered with another Japanese man in a studio for a short time before opening his own. He was the principal photographer contracted by the CF&I Steelworks, the largest business in Pueblo. He had a wide format camera that he used to take large group photographs as well as doing studio portraits.

One interesting bit of history I gleaned from the article regarded the internment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans during World War II. There was an internment camp in southeastern Colorado, originally called Granada, but changed to Amache. As an aside, Amache was a Cheyenne woman married to rancher and trader John Prowers (namesake of Prowers County). She would likely have been appalled to have the camp named for her. Her father was one of the Cheyenne headmen murdered by the Colorado 3^rd Regiment at Sand Creek in 1864.⁸

The Japanese population of Colorado, however, were NOT interned, though it’s believed that Frank and his family did visit Granada. Colorado’s governor, Ralph Carr, was the only U.S. Governor to exempt Colorado residents from President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. Frank’s two sons served in the war as interpreters in the Pacific theater.

I encourage you to visit the link to the Pueblo Library District’s article, which gives much more information about the Japanese community in Pueblo, and also has an extensive display of Frank Muramoto’s work (courtesy of the Pueblo County Historical Society). It includes pictures of Frank, portraits, group sittings, tourist attractions around Colorado, and even several short films.

Feature image: De Luxe Studio at 1142 E. Evans Ave., Pueblo, Colorado (Photo by Frank D. Muramoto. Pueblo Colorado Historical Society pchs-p-99-0086a.)