Fred Hartsook

Fred Hartsook. . , Celebrities Sat for His Camera , Back when the fields of the San Fernando Valley helped to feed California and eventually the nation, Fred Hartsook raised champion black and white Holstein dairy cows with names like Bessie, Snowball, and Tillie. Hartsook was a hands-on rancher, wrote Los Angeles historian and writer John S. McGroarty , a man who raised goats and hogs and drove his own mule team. , For several generations, in the Midwest and on the East Coast, photography had been the Hartsook family business. Hartsook came to Southern California as a young man, and soon he too became as well known for hoisting a camera as a milk pail. Silent film stars like Mary Pickford sat for him, as did such notables as auto tycoon Henry Ford, aviator Charles Lindbergh VW and presidents Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover. , Milk Money and Other Business Ventures , His lasting impact on photography, though, was commercial. He owned a pioneering chain of photo studios from San Francisco to Santa Ana, and sent out discount coupons, to the fury of his competitors. , He and his wife, Bess Hesby Hartsook, a "Miss Liberty" beauty queen at the 1915 Pan-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, bought their Northern California honeymoon cabin not long after they were married, and turned the redwood forest property into a resort called the Hartsook Inn, a getaway for celebrities. , Hard Times for Hartsook , The 1920s dealt Hartsook a string of reverses. His renowned Holstein herd had to be killed in 1924 because livestock inspectors had tracked in hoof and mouth disease on their boots and carried it through Hartsook's pastures. Three years later, the Hartsook Inn burned down, and in 1929, Hartsook lost his photo business. He was only 53 when he died of a heart attack the following year. His widow rebuilt the lodge and ran the inn for a few years thereafter, until it burned down again. The Hartsook Inn would survive a series of fires under a series of owners. Today it is privately owned as part of a conservation agreement with the Save the Redwoods League. , Some of Hartsook's famous studio portraits can still be seen on the Internet. The local post office near the Hartsook Inn bore the Hartsook name for a time, and in Humboldt County, a creek and a noted redwood tree, the "Hartsook Giant," still carry his name. Here in North Hollywood, Hartsook Street , the site of his dairy ranch , is named for the agricultural and photographic pioneer, and nearby Hesby Street is named after his wife.