Vast photo collection documents San Mateo County life over several decades

They say a picture is worth a thousand words.

Which would mean that this story, about the donation of 250,000 images to the San Mateo County Historical Association, should be very, very long. The equivalent, say, of a stack of 320 King James Bibles’ worth of words.

But maybe the photos should be allowed to do most of the talking.

Retired commercial and news photographer Norton Pearl has donated his archive of 250,000 negatives to the county’s historical association, which now has them packed tightly into more than 60 legal-sized cardboard boxes taking up nearly every spare nook and cranny in the San Mateo County History Museum’s Archives room. The archives are in the San Mateo County History Museum in downtown Redwood City at 2200 Broadway.

The boxes of negatives represent decades of photography by Mr. Pearl, a resident of San Mateo, who worked first as a freelance news photographer, then for United Press, and later as the owner of a commercial photography business on the Peninsula.

The photos include shots of celebrities such as Shirley Temple Black, Bing Crosby and Tony Bennett; politicians such as Ronald Reagan, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and Earl Warren; local events such as a 1948 high school dance, Crystal Springs Dam overflowing, the Golden Gate National Cemetery covered in snow (taken from the air), the Golden Gate Bridge being painted (taken from near the top of the bridge) and a 1960 San Mateo County Fair exhibit of a comely model in a “spacesuit.”

The treasure trove of images will need some work before the photos are available for researchers to easily use. The images are now organized by client and assignment, and dated; but are not indexed by the subject of the photos, and almost all are negatives not prints. “We have to completely re-organize them to make them useful for the public,” says Mitch Postel, president of the historical association. Mr. Pearl has promised to help with the organizing.

Mr. Pearl, who turns 81 on Dec. 17, says the oldest negative in the collection was taken in 1948 when he was still in high school. He started taking photos, however, when he was only 8 years old, and was developing his own film and printing photos by the time he was 12.

“Photography was kind of always in my blood,” Mr. Pearl says.

He got a taste for news photography when he was about 13, living near the chief of the Burlingame volunteer fire department. When young Norton heard the alarm horn, he’d run to the corner and wait for the chief to pick him up and give him a ride to the fire.

He sold photos, first to the Burlingame Advance newspaper and later, when the Advance refused to increase the $3.50 payment it gave him for photos, to the San Mateo Times, which paid Mr. Pearl $5.

In high school Norton took photos for the school paper and yearbook, and continued to freelance news photos.

“It started out as a hobby, and then I paid my way through college with it, really, doing freelance work,” Mr. Pearl says.

In college, he realized he wanted to make photography his career. He went to work for United Press, which later became United Press International, but realized he might have trouble moving up in the organization if he wanted to stay in the Bay Area.

So he went to work for a photography studio in San Mateo, buying it a few years later. The company’s business mostly involved publicity and marketing photos.

Having worked for United Press and several newspapers, Mr. Pearl knew what images publications wanted and his business was to provide them.

“It was a great time for photography,” he says.

The business grew rapidly. “We ended up being the largest commercial studio on the Peninsula,” Mr. Pearl says.

His clients were local, regional, national and international and included Hillsdale Shopping Center, the Hyatt, the San Mateo County Fair, Ford Motors, General Electric, Kaiser Aluminum, Hewlett Packard and GTE.

For Lenkurt Electric, he took photos of telecommunications equipment being used on Alaska’s North Slope; for the Pineapple Growers of Hawaii, he took pictures of a cooking contest in Hawaii.

Mr. Pearl says that one thing that increases the value of the collection he has donated to the museum is that it includes all the photos he took not just the ones that were published. That gives researchers a good idea of the context in which the photos were taken. “You now have the ability to look and see what else was going on,” he says.

Mr. Postel of the historic association says the museum now has about 310,000 images in its collection, with recent additions from Bay Meadows and the San Mateo Times archives.

The public can use the museum’s archives free of charge on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. (closed between noon and 12:30 p.m.) and on Sundays, from noon to 4 p.m. Museum staff recommends making an appointment with Archivist Carol Peterson by calling (650) 299-0104, ext. 222.

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