Teague Documentary: Progress Update

Kodak Brownie Junior - Photo by J.A. Morris

This summer has been busy with new progress on the Teague documentary and biography.  Here's a quick summary:

New Alliances

            Thanks to Vicki Matranga, I connected with Charlie Myers, son of C. Stowe Myers, partner at the Teague New York office.  Charlie has compiled films, audio interviews, and photographs and is offering them for us to use in the doc.  I just received a DVD of digitized 8mm film of the Teague office from 1939 to 1943.  It has great scenes of employee designers working, drawing, rendering, making models, smoking pipes and having parties.  Awesome stuff, thanks Charlie!

            Gifford Jackson was a designer at the Teague office from 1954 to 64 and I was recently introduced to him through Budd Steinhilber.  He was personal friends with the Teague family.  He lives in New Zealand and has offered to write stories about his experiences there.

New Interviews

            At the IDSA International Conference in Portland, I was able to interview Ron Kemnitzer, Budd Steinhilber, and Craig Vogel about Teague.  Ron is the chair of the industrial design program at Virginia Tech, and former IDSA president. Budd worked at the Loewy office in the 40's and told a great story about his meeting Walter D. Teague at an office party.  Craig is an ID professor at University of Cincinnati and he drew insightful comparisons between Teague and his colleagues, Loewy, Dreyfuss and Bel Geddes.  Thanks to them for their time and contributions!

            Next week I have the honor of interviewing Bob Blaich, former Teague designer and current Teague board member.  Thanks to Sarah Matheney for arranging his visit and giving us the Teague conference room to shoot.

Kodak Flash Bantam - Photo by J.A. Morris

New Teague designed objects shot!

Thanks to design students Beth Blair and Carson Leh, they let me borrow their Kodak Brownie cameras, Baby Brownie, Brownie Hawkeye, Flash Bantam, and six-20 Brownie Junior.  Which I shot on a turntable with a Canon 5D mkII.

New Turntable

Jim Sheppard, Vince Hill, technicians at WWU, and workstudy electrical engineering students worked on and built an electric variable speed turntable for filming products as they slowly rotate.  Thanks guys, I can't wait to try it out!

Boeing 377, Tillamook Air Museum, Photo by J.A. Morris

The Search for a Boeing Stratocruiser

I went to the Tillamook Air Museum in Oregon to see a Boeing 377 guppy, which was a Stratocruiser but converted into a cargo plane, and consequently looks horrible.  I shot what remained of the original aircraft, which was its flight deck, wings and engines.  Thanks goes to curator, Christian Gurling, for the access!  Although he reports that there are no more Stratocruisers left in one piece.  Has anybody seen one?  I hear that there might be some in an aircraft junkyard in Arizona somewhere?

Press

At least three articles came out recently announcing my development of the Teague biography. The Bellingham Herald, The Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce, and the UnBeige design blog.  Thanks for the coverage!

The Digitization of Archives

Thanks to Sarah Matheny of TEAGUE, the design office is having all of their archival photos and slides digitized.  This saves hours and hours of individually scanning each one.  Alleluia!

Fund Raising

I will be putting research on hold while I work on fund raising this fall.  This will involve grant writing and sending out donor letters and setting up a project on Kickstarter.com.  Stay tuned for more details.

Thanks,

J. A. Morris