yrhklbery
Member
I found this photo at a thrift store in Sonora, CA. I was wondering if there is any way to figure out the mans name from the signature of the photographer and the markings on the back.
I found this photo at a thrift store in Sonora, CA. I was wondering if there is any way to figure out the mans name from the signature of the photographer and the markings on the back.
Could it be the ex medical student called Griffin?
a.k.a. The Invisible Man.
Yes he joined, posted a "one liner" with no photo for us to examine and left 7 mins later and hasn't been seen since. It strikes me as a little strange.I'm kinda wondering what happened to the OP.
It strikes me as a little strange.
Such things happen. Someone joins a handful of forums and asks the same question - might take a while to come back - might never come back. Such is life....
Come on, we can do better than this.
Not sure. William "Billy" J. Perkins seems to be a mighty common name, and I'm not !00% convinced you've got the right one.OK, I'll give it a try.
Guy's name is William "Billy" J. Perkins. He was a sargent in the US Army, did two tours in Korea between 1951 and 1953. Perkins was originally from Ottumwa, Iowa. He had enlisted in the US Army right after his father died at Iwo Jima in early March 1945.
Photo was actually taken in Salt Lake City, Utah (how it got to Sonoma, CA, is an interesting story in itself), on June 25th, 1954. Billy Perkis was then stationed in Pocatello, Idaho, but used to go visit friends in Salt Lake City on weekends (thus the reason why he's not in uniform on the photo). Photographer in this particular case was not the one whose name appears on the back side of the photo, but, as was often the case in these days, his assistant, one Montgomery "Monty" Jones, originally from Perry, Georgia, who later returned to his home state and for a few years ran a successful photo studio in Augusta.
A couple of interesting photo facts related to this story. For one, Billy Perkins' father, Robert J. Perkins, was standing right next to Joe Rosenthal when he shot his Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of the marines raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi. You can actually see Robert J. on a couple of frames on Rosenthal's contact sheets for that day (ressemblance with his son Billy is quite striking).
Monty Jones got his taste for photography from briefly meeting Gordon Parks in Washington, D.C., not long after the photographer got hired by Roy Striker.
Other fun fact: one of the consultants on the show M*A*S*H* — I forget his name — had served in Korea, had met Billy Perkins there, and had told a few stories about him to Larry Gelbart. The fact that Walter "Radar" O'Reilly is from Ottumwa, Iowa, his farm-boy naiveté and a few other personality traits of the character played by Gary Burghoff that weren't stated in the original book or movie, were inspired by the real-life Billy Perkins. Perkins never got to see the show. He died in 1967 from a heart attack while visiting his sister in Santa Rosa, California.
Did I get it right?
Not sure. William "Billy" J. Perkins seems to be a mighty common name, and I'm not !00% convinced you've got the right one.
Post and ask how to do it.
And I would answer the same way I did in another thread just 27 minutes ago:
"If you resize your image to a jpeg with quality 80 and a longest dimension of 1000 pixels it should upload well.".
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