Advertisements Are Sacred

Continuing with the family photo project, I decided to work on my grandfather’s folder today.

He’s probably younger in this picture than I am now by a number of years. I can’t say I knew my grandfather very well. I got the distinct impression he didn’t like me much when I was little. He changed somewhat after his stroke in 1995, when I was 15. But, by then, neither of us knew what to say to each other. I’ll say this for him. He appeared to have found a hairstyle and facial expression that he liked early on and stuck with them.

This is a photo from my grandparents’ wedding reception. I don’t know the date, but I would have to guess sometime between 1939 and 1941 from the uniform. But this was a really great find when we were going through the stacks of pictures.

---

American Flats is apparently quite the common photo location over on Flickr. However, I have the distinction of being the only person with black-and-white pictures. I considered bringing color film on the trip, knowing that Niki would be taking me out there at some point, but I decided to go all black-and-white on a hunch. I knew I wanted to photograph that area in black-and-white for a reason, but I didn’t know what that reason was. Now, having finished work on those photos and put them up next to everyone else’s color shots of the same places, I know why. In color, the pictures are about the graffiti. The graffiti upstages the other elements. And it’s certainly a valid perspective to take with putting the graffiti first, but I wanted to tell a different story. In black-and-white, the graffiti seems more integrated into the whole. It goes back to a draft of an artist’s statement I wrote for my marketing class a couple years ago. I wrote that I like to make images from the perspective of an alien who’s crashed on earth and has no way of leaving. An alien wouldn’t necessarily see the graffiti as something that didn’t belong there, or as something that was added later and wasn’t intended to be part of the structure, or that the people who built the structures and the people who painted the structures would even be different groups of people. So I didn’t want to necessarily see things that way either. I wanted the graffiti to be part of the story, not the entire story.

---

Oh yeah, I got an e-mail this afternoon from the art director at the agency with the O Bel Sole account, and they are really happy with the work I did for them. That was very gratifying to hear. That was a bright spot on an already good day.

There were about 4 more American Flats pictures I was thinking of finishing, but none of them are as strong as the eight I’ve already done, so I think I’ll stop now. Maybe take a fresh look at the remaining images in a month or so.

So, moving on, I am finally getting started on the huge stack of old family photos I have to scan. This is one stack among many, but it’s the only stack I have. Still, it’s huge. This stack is pictures that my second-cousin-once-removed Bill went through at my grandparents’ house in Fresno… stuff that we felt was important enough to take priority over everything else. So, I started with one of the most significant pictures, an 8×10 portrait of my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Duff Hopper. Of the various Hoppers who have contacted me since I posted the entry on Stanley Romaine Hopper’s book, The Crisis of Faith, Samuel Duff Hopper is the closest common ancestor.

This one wasn’t too bad as far as image restoration goes. Image restoration is different from retouching. It can be a little more intense than basic retouching–more on a level with glamour/fashion retouching, depending on the condition of the source image. But this one wasn’t too bad. It pretty much just required some dust removal and contrast enhancement. This was an 8×10 that was under glass still in its original frame, so it was pretty well-preserved. I’m sure there will be a few that will be a little more hairy. Anyway, if any extended family would like an 11×14 or smaller print of this, contact me.

Anyway, aside from working on other projects, I’ve also been waiting to start on this project because I’ve been looking for a more appropriate place to display the pictures on the web than here on my blog or in my Flickr stream. The ideal place would be a genealogy/family tree site, such as the one belonging to Rodney Hopper that I linked to in the prior entry. But, I’m pretty sure only Rodney Hopper can add or change information on that site, and the e-mail address listed for him is no longer valid. Plus, I would like something with a graphical interface, which would require it to be Flash-based, rather than the HTML-based lists generated on that site. So, the ideal would be something like a Facebook-style social networking site based around family and genealogy. There are a few out there. The two that I found that looked promising were Famiva.com and Geni.com. Famiva provides a lot more information about how the site works before you sign up than Geni, and I signed up for both, but after spending most of Thursday on Geni entering in the information on the Hopper family that Bill had given me when we went through the pictures, I don’t think I’ll be putting in the time for a second site. Geni works just fine, although some of its functions are a little counter-intuitive. For example, I had the following situation: one ancestor married a man and had a daughter. This ancestor then passed away. Her widowed husband then married one of her sisters, which was common up until the 20th century. They had 3 more children. Trying to get Geni’s system to recognize the two sisters’ husband as the same man took some doing. In fact, I’ll have to do the same thing again if I find out who the parents of Samuel Duff Hopper’s 2 wives were, since my great-great-grandmother was his first wife, and his second wife (Stanley Romaine Hopper’s mother) was her sister. One last thing–the Hopper family needs a moratorium on the use of the name “Mary.” There have been way too many people named Mary Hopper over the last 237 years.

I have just returned from a 5-day trip to Santa Barbara and Fresno. I had my 2007 Antelope Valley Fair entries printed in Santa Barbara and spent some time hanging out with my good friend and likely future business partner/employer, Rachel Gomez. I’m placing 11 entries in the professional category this year. All but one were printed on an Epson 4800 inkjet printer at Brooks Institute of Photography. The remaining one, I wet-printed myself in the darkroom at Antelope Valley College. I’ll post the images I’ve entered once the Fair is over. If you want to see what I’ve entered before then, you’re just gonna have to haul your ass almost all the way to Kern County to find out.

Fresno was quite interesting this time around. On Thursday, my grandmother moved into the retirement community her two sisters have lived in the last several years. In fact, her apartment is right around the corner from her younger sister’s. Anyway, my father and aunts were busy clearing out the house my grandparents bought in 1951. I had noticed this book in the bookcase by the front door years ago, but hadn’t really looked through it until this weekend, and now it’s mine because no one else really had much interest. The book is The Crisis of Faith by Stanley Romaine Hopper. And yes, there is a relation. Stanley Romaine Hopper is my great-grandfather’s younger half-brother, making him my great-great-half-uncle (or, as my maternal grandfather, a horse trader, would say, “not related”). The dust jacket contained some information that I never knew, such as the S.T.B. degree S. R. Hopper received from Boston University before spending a year at Harvard. This, in turn, took me on a googlequest through this wonderful series of tubes. One of the more recent and interesting webpages that discusses his work is a paper on The Society for the Arts, Religion, and Contemporary Culture website.

I also came across the Hopper Family Home Page, which enabled me to trace my lineage all the way back to my great-great-great-great-grandfather, Robert Hopper, born in Ireland around 1770. That website makes some interesting claims that cannot be verified, specifically, that Robert Hopper (and therefore myself as well) was directly descended from Mary, Queen of Scots, or Queen Anne, and that there were other relations to various Irish, Scottish, and English nobility with the name of Hopper and/or Happer. What can be verified is that he was a Private in the U.S. Army during the War of 1812 and died from his wounds at the end of that year. Much more verifiable information is available about my great-great-grandfather, Captain Sam. Samuel Duff Hopper was the 7th of 9 children. He was wounded at the 1st Battle of Fort Wagner, the battle depicted at the end of the 1989 film, Glory (though he was with a regiment from Ohio, not Massachusetts). After the Civil War, he briefly owned some kind of store in Kearney, Nebraska (where a significant portion of my mother’s side of the family is from). My great-grandfather, Bernal Merza Hopper, was his 2nd child. His 5th child was the painter, Shirley Marie Russell, and his 6th child was Dr. Stanley Romaine Hopper. Oh, and there is no Edward Hopper or Dennis Hopper in the master list of individuals on that site, so if I am related to either the famous painter or actor, it’s not at all a close relation.

It seems I’ve broken some kind of family tradition by not joining the Army. My grandfather was in the Army, his grandfather was in the Army, and his grandfather before him was also in the Army. Of course, the intensity of the family service has been winding down, like Sigourney Weaver’s hair in the first 3 Alien movies. My great-great-great-great-grandfather died from his wounds in the Army. My great-great-grandfather was wounded in combat, but lived for several more decades. My grandfather… I don’t think he was ever in combat.

The family line, according to The Hopper Family Home Page entry on Robert Hopper:
Robert Hopper (1770-1812), married to Jane Duff
i. William W. Hopper (1790-1862)
ii. Samuel Hopper (1792-1831)
iii. Martha Hopper (1794-unknown)
iv. Polly Hopper (1795-unknown)
v. Robert Hopper (1797-1879)
vi. Jane Hopper (1800-unknown)
vii. John Hopper (1802-1886)
viii. James Hopper (1804-1865)
ix. Betsy Hopper (1806-1872)
x. Mary Hopper (1807-unknown)

William W. Hopper (1790-1862) married to Phoebe Lewis
i. Jane Elizabeth Hopper (1825-1907)
ii. Robert Washington Hopper (1829-1924).
iii. Ellen Eliza Hopper (1831-1907)
iv. Mary Catherine Hopper (1832-1864)
v. James Lewis Hopper (1834-1862)
vi. William Waters Hopper (1836-1926)
vii. Samuel Duff Hopper (1838-1934)
viii. John Wesley Hopper (1841-1864)
ix. Phoebe Annie Hopper (1844-1921)

Samuel Duff Hopper (1838-1934) married to Rachel Lucinda Foster
i. Leona May Hopper (1871-1969)
ii. Bernal Merza Hopper (1878-1949)
iii. Maximilian Duff Hopper (1880-1978)
iv. Zulema Ellen Hopper (1882-1959)
v. Shirley Ximena Hopper (1886-1985)
Samuel Duff Hopper (1838-1934) married to Rachel D. (Emma) Foster
i. Stanley Romaine Hopper (1907-1991)

Bernal Merza Hopper (1878-1949) married to Bessie Wells
i. Morris Hopper (1905-1969)
ii. Wallace Hopper (1907-2002)
iii. Rowland Wells Hopper (1911-2006)

Rowland Wells Hopper (1911-2006) married to Sarah ———-
i. Neil Hopper (1945-present)
ii. Janet Hopper (1946-present)
iii. Lynne Hopper (1950-present)

Neil Hopper (1945-present) married to Judith ——-
i. Daisy Hopper (1977-present)
ii. Damian Hopper (1980-present)

My paternal grandfather passed away last September, 10 days before his 95th birthday, while I was on a plane to Boston. In the months since, my grandmother has decided to move out of the house they moved into in 1950 and move into the retirement community where her sisters live. This weekend, I drove up to Fresno to help my dad sort through the 57+ years worth of stuff in the basement. We found many items of various levels of interest. At the most mundane were the accounting logs from the farm my grandfather owned with his brothers in the 50’s, 60′, and 70’s. More interesting were the various aeronautical charts, airplane brochures, and car brochures ranging from the 1959 Chevrolet brochure to mid-90’s GM truck brochures. Much of it was up for grabs, and I am now in possession of my grandfather’s tiny B.A. diploma from Fresno State College, my great-grandfather’s poster-size high school diploma (he graduated in 1895), a number of my grandfather’s army uniforms (including his class-A tunic that still has his 1st Lieutenant epaulet pins, officer’s and Air Corps lapel pins, and pilot’s wings all affixed), and something my dad and I like to call “the letter opener of death,” as it is a letter opener that looks like some kind of ceremonial dagger. My grandmother and Aunt Janet had invited a World War II buff to go through the stuff with us, and he was able to tell me a lot about the things we found. We let him take a number of documents, training manuals, and uniform pieces with him. We also found a handful of pictures, including the one below. We determined that my grandfather received his commission in 1938 from the documents, letting us date the photograph sometime between mid-1938 (since he is wearing an officer’s uniform) and the end of 1941, by the placement of various insignia on the uniforms. The rank insignia are on the shoulders, and the overseas caps and left lapels display the division insignia (the right lapel would have the officer’s “U.S.” insignia on it). This was changed after our entry into World War II. Anyway, my grandfather is second from the right. Click the picture to embiggen.

Oh, and because my grandfather lived through the Great Depression, he had a tendency to hide money all over the place. I could pay this month’s bills in Susan B. Anthony dollars now.