Editor's Letter

Mark Twain changed the course of my life. Not dramatically. It was more of an adjustment, like lowering the thermostat. Or switching to organic strawberries. I’d always been drawn to his writing. And was intent on reading everything he’d ever written. I was on my ninth or 10th novel when I bought a used copy of A Tramp Abroad, a collection

of witty observations that came out of a walking tour he’d made through Central Europe. One of the essays in that book is titled The Awful German Language. 

“A person who has not studied German can form no idea of what a perplexing language it is,” he wrote. “Surely there is not another language that is so slipshod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp. The inventor of the language seems to have taken pleasure in complicating it in every way he could think of.”

I don’t know what made me think that taking German as an undergrad was a good idea. Most of my friends were taking French or Spanish. One was taking Latin. I was in my second semester of German when I read that essay and found salvation.

It’s not me, I thought. It’s the German language, with its counterintuitive noun genders and separable verbs. The next semester, I switched to Spanish. The change wasn’t dramatic, but it was liberating, and gave me the nerve to change my major from engineering to journalism.

“There are far better things ahead than any we leave behind,” C.S. Lewis said. 

That was true for me. And for Charles Herbert, too.
 

Like so many of our most renowned photographers, Mr. Herbert ended up in Arizona serendipitously. His adventure began in 1923, when he spent $700 on a photo expedition that was headed to the West Indies from the city of New Orleans. At the time, he’d never seen a motion picture camera, so he signed on as a cook and deckhand. Not that it mattered. The expedition quickly ran out of supplies and money, and when it docked in Mobile, Alabama, a sheriff seized the ship. The only return on Mr. Herbert’s $700 was a 35 mm Ernemann wooden box motion picture camera and a heavy tripod. With those two things, he headed to Miami with the ship’s captain, and helped the skipper make commercial films in Florida.

Eventually, the young man split off and went to work for Pathé News, a British-French producer of newsreels and documentaries, and Fox Movietone. He also worked for Universal Studios. It was early on in that sequence that he met his wife and eventual business partner, Lucille. Together, they worked on documentaries all over the world. North America, South America, Asia, Africa, Europe … even Tucson, Arizona, where they produced three travelogues for Universal: The Trail of Father Kino, Tucson Trails and South of the Border.

Like Mikey staring at a spoonful of Life cereal, they liked what they saw in the Sonoran Desert and decided to make it their home. By that time, they’d been to 56 countries, including Germany, and worked as staff members for major news and documentary motion picture producers, and also as freelance photographers. 

In all, Herb, as he was known, produced 684 motion picture feature stories, 105 travel reels, six commercial films, a full-length documentary and 32 illustrated articles. He was a multimedia professional before the term existed. And it was that experience that led to the creation of Western Ways, which began as a photo lab in his guest house in the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains and grew into an enterprise that produced a range of content: landscape photography, portraiture, photo finishing, feature stories, motion pictures, murals, aerial photography, postcards, microfilm and commercial photographic art.

One of his first employees was our Hall of Fame photographer Ray Manley, who was hired as a “specialist in color photography” in the summer of 1946 and was promoted to vice president in July 1949. Some of the others were Pete and Phyllis Balestrero, Naurice Koonce and Vivien Keatley, all of whom were frequent contributors to Arizona Highways.
 

Mr. Herbert made his debut in our magazine in December 1946 with a handful of photographs. A year later, in November 1947, his team was ubiquitous in a magazine dedicated to Sonora, Mexico. In all, that issue featured 41 photographs from Western Ways, including 12 four-color Kodachromes, two of which ended up on the front and back covers. In addition, there were 29 black-and-white images, along with a feature story written by Clifton Abbott, one of Mr. Herbert’s first writers. We paid $281 for the photographs and $65 for the story, for a total of $346. When adjusted for inflation, that’s about $5,200.

Over the next 25 years, the Herberts and Western Ways would play a vital role in the evolution of Arizona Highways. “Herb was a veritable fountain of ideas, on both finding and marketing feature stories, and his energy was legendary,” said Nancy Sartore, another one of the company’s early employees. “And behind the Western Ways symbol, always, was Lucille, a full partner. With her sweet Georgia drawl, she was a mover and a shaker.”

A mover and a shaker. Or as they say in German, Macher und Gestalter. Or maybe it’s Frau der Tat. Or Schlüsselakteur und Impulsgeber. It’s a complicated language. And like Mark Twain, I never really did figure it out.