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The Al Parker collection includes three envelopes of photographs, sheet music, and newspaper clippings as well as a scrapbook relating to the professional and personal life of Philadelphia-based photographer and photographic supplies salesman Alfred Parker.

The Al Parker collection includes three envelopes of photographs, sheet music, and newspaper clippings as well as a scrapbook relating to the professional and personal life of Philadelphia-based photographer and photographic supplies salesman Alfred Parker.

Envelope A (photographs): includes unmounted oval portraits of Parker’s children Eda and Ray from the early 1900s; studio portraits of Eda and his wife Alice from the 1910s, two of them from the Philadelphia studio of Gilbert and Bacon; an mounted school class photo (ca. 1890s?)

Envelope B (sheet music): includes three examples of World War I songs from the Eagle Publishing Company of Philadelphia with "music by Geo. L. Robertson and lyrics by Al. Parker."

Envelope C (letters, clippings, etc.): includes a letter appointing Dr. Ray Parker head of plastic surgery at a hospital in Johnstown, PA; a magazine article on “Flood Free Johnstown”; letters and clippings about Dr. Ray Parker; article on World War II factory workers; newspaper article on Theodore Roosevelt urging U.S. entry into World War I; and a note from Christmas 1926 from Parker’s grandson Donald addressed to “Ganco."

Scrapbook: The volume (37 x 28) is cloth-bound and has 66 pages total. Materials are not arranged in any chronological or thematic order and so unrelated items often appear together on the same page.

The album begins with photographs of Parker’s family members while the next few pages focus on scenes from his professional life, including a magazine cover from April 1900 and documentation of his break with Willis & Clements in 1910. Portraits of Parker at every stage of his life appear throughout the scrapbook, though not in any chronological order. The earliest is a tintype from the 1850s that shows him as a young boy with his brothers. Many portraits and casual snapshots of Parker's daughter Eda and son Ray from their early childhood into adulthood are included, while a collection of clippings reflects Parker’s pride in Ray's success as a doctor. His delight in playing the doting grandfather is clear from the drawings Parker made for Eda’s son Donald and in the notes that Donald wrote to Parker using the nickname “Ganco.”

A handful of portraits that were taken by Parker show that he was a capable studio photographer in addition to being a successful promoter of platinum photography products while working for Willis & Clements. Requests for his opinions from Eastman Kodak Company, Photo Era magazine, and the Photographers’ Association of New England testify to his recognized expertise. Numerous portraits of Parker in the company of other well-regarded photographers of the day confirm his acceptance in that professional circle.

Many ephemeral items also help illuminate the arc of Parker's career including programs from his minstrel show days; an advertisement for his Australian window blind company; the initial offer of employment from Willis and Clements; business cards from various stages of his career; and an ad for a new camera shutter he invented. Interspersed amongst these items are letters and photographs from various colleagues and employers along with miscellaneous poems, cartoons, programs, drawings, song lyrics, newspaper clippings, and so on.

The Willard Cundiff scrapbook contains 64 photographs as well as poems, cartoons, illustrations, and inscriptions compiled by a young man visiting El Paso, Texas, and other western locales while being preoccupied with unrequited love.

The Willard Cundiff scrapbook contains 64 photographs as well as poems, cartoons, illustrations, and inscriptions compiled by a young man visiting El Paso, Texas, and other western locales while being preoccupied with unrequited love.

Sometime between 1905 and 1908, Willard Cundiff became enamored with a young woman in El Paso named Argyra White. Both were teenagers at the time and while they may have seen each other on a few occasions the infatuation was clearly not mutual as Argyra was apparently more interested in a young man named Eldon Burns. By 1909 she had married a doctor and moved to Chicago. Various captions in the scrapbook suggest that the volume was mostly compiled in the aftermath of Cundiff’s rejection.

The scrapbook (26 x 33 cm) has green cloth covers and is framed as a personal tribute from Cundiff to Argyra White. Photographs of El Paso and other towns in the southwestern United States and Mexico (including Cloudcroft and Mesilla Valley in New Mexico and Tucson, Arizona) taken by Cundiff may have started out as potential postcard material for his employer at the time, Humphries and Co., yet Cundiff compiled and reimagined these scenes as places he might have enjoyed with Argyra. Small illustrations and verses he included with the photos express both his devotion to her and his disappointment at being rejected. Nearly every drawing includes a small image of a bleeding heart with an arrow driven through it. Some illustrations are of scenes near Antwerp and Innsbruck, suggesting that Cundiff also may have traveled to Europe. A few of the drawings seem to record actual encounters that Cundiff had with Argyra on a street, at a theater, and at a skating rink. The album ends with a picture of a cemetery captioned “we go to the last long sleep, the end of all disappointment.”

Cundiff appears to have recovered from his ill-fated romantic endeavors eventually. By 1908 he had relocated to southern California and became a successful illustrator. In that same year he published a cartoon version of Who’s Who in Riverside California, and in 1914 he came out with an innovative book of road maps envisioned from the air, The Panoramic Automobile Road Map and Tourist Guide of Southern California, published by The Cadmus Press in Los Angeles.