– 2018 Individual Inductee –

Leslie Winfield Halbe

 

Working at his father’s Dorrance, Kansas drug store in 1907, 14-year-old Leslie Winfield Halbe discovered a small box camera among the shelves. Curious, he soon began to take pictures, managing to produce a nationally-celebrated visual record of rural and small-town life in pre-World War I America that continues to grow in importance with each passing year.

 

Leslie was born October 8, 1893 in Dorrance, Russell County, Kansas. He was the eldest of the six children of George and Elisabeth “Lizzie” (Fankhauser) Halbe, who ran a drug, candy & confectionary shop in Dorrance.  During his first years the family lived in Dorrance; by 1900 they were living on a farm just outside of town.  Leslie attended the Dorrance schools and helped out in the family shop.  Then came his encounter with the small, inexpensive Sears and Roebuck box camera.

 

A fascinated Leslie subscribed to photography magazines and taught himself how to use the camera, and how to develop glass negatives and reproduce photographs. Beginning in 1908 the teenager snapped pictures all over Dorrance and surrounding Russell and Ellsworth Counties. His studio was a tent in his parents’ yard; his first darkroom was the family bathroom, later moved to the basement.  Stacks of glass negatives were soon being stored in wooden boxes in the Halbe family barn.

 

“Our photographer, Mr. Leslie Halbe, is kept busy. His work has given satisfaction.” – reported the Wilson World newspaper on August 20, 1908.

 

A professional from the start, Leslie charged twenty-five cents each or three dollars per dozen for picture postcards, and due to the quality of his work, business was good. Everything around him was fair game for his camera – farmwork, landscapes and urbanscapes, the ins and outs of businesses, homes, vehicles, machinery, recreation, and, of course, people.  

 

Despite his lack of training and modest equipment, Leslie had an innate talent for the work. He was able to get natural expressions and poses from his subjects and his photographs proved to be of exceptional technical quality. His use of natural light and shadow is nothing short of astounding. Young Leslie did not realize it, but what he was documenting was a rural Kansas in transition from the end of the horse-drawn age of the 19th Century to the dawn of the machine-driven 20th Century.

 

In the fall of 1912 Leslie left Kansas to attain a law degree at the University of Missouri. He spent a year in college before returning to Dorrance, where he became a rural school teacher.

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“Leslie Halbe has closed a successful term of school Friday at the Joe Garrett school. He will now devote his entire time to photographic endeavors, at which he is a dandy.” – Dorrance News, April 17, 1913.

 

Leslie worked the summer of 1913 as a photographer. That October the following announcement appeared in a local newspaper:

 

“Photograph Gallery closed, and Leslie Halbe is employed at K. C. [Kansas City].” – Dorrance Star, October 9, 1913.  Leslie never took a commercial photograph again.

 

When Leslie packed up his camera and tent and rode his motorcycle to Kansas City, Missouri to pursue a career, Leslie’s younger brother Lionel Halbe and his friend Lewis Reilly moved Leslie’s glass negatives into the farm home’s attic. Leslie had been offered a job as a bank teller at the First National Bank in Kansas City. He was still working there when he registered for the World War I draft in June 1917.  On December 14, 1917, Leslie enlisted in the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps.

 

“When a young man is made of right kind of stuff it is safe to think that he will do the right thing at the right time so when Saturday we heard that Leslie Halbe had enlisted in the ordnance corps of the government service it came as no surprise. A young man who alone and unaided can work himself up from the lower rungs of the banking ladder to the “very heart of a bank” in a few short years is made of stuff that would not await conscription but would volunteer his services and have them accepted In a branch of army life where his ability, accuracy and training will make him a superior hand. Mr. Halbe has been ordered to Jefferson Barracks, St. Louis.” – Dorrance Star, December 20, 1917.

 

The Dorrance paper received periodic letters from Leslie, letting his hometown and family know that he was okay and how things were going with the war. In the fall of 1918 he experienced a Paris air raid, and in January 1919 reported that he was now in Germany with the rank of corporal.  Then on July 17, 1919 the now Sergeant Halbe was discharged and sent home.

 

Leslie went back to his job as a bank teller at the First National Bank in Kansas City.  In 1924 he moved to Fort Pierce, St. Lucie County, Florida.  On September 16, 1926, Leslie married Sallie J. McCrary in Kansas City.  From then on Fort Pierce was their permanent home.

 

In 1930 Leslie was working in Fort Pierce as the manager of a building & loan. In the 1940 U.S. Census he gave his vocation as being a salesman.  By 1960 he had settled into his last job as an appraiser.  Leslie Winfield Halbe died at his Fort Pierce home on April 13, 1981, and was laid to rest in Riverview Memorial Park, Fort Pierce, Florida.

 

Meanwhile, in Kansas Leslie’s collection of old glass negatives were suffering from neglect.  Some were damaged and lost in the flood in 1951, while still others had been taken out by kids and shot at as target practice with BB guns.  When Leslie’s mother Lizzie moved to Florida in the early 1960s, Leslie’s collection of negatives were loaned to Fort Hays State College for cataloguing and documentation. The well over 1,500 remaining negatives were then donated to the Kansas Historical Society. The collection can be viewed online at www.kansasmemory.org.  Russell County native Patricia Michaelis, then working at the Kansas State Historical Society, helped the Dorrance Historical Society create an excellent permanent exhibit of Halbe photographs, including some never seen before in the Society’s museum in Dorrance.

 

Some ninety years after their creation Leslie Halbe’s photographic images were rediscovered, becoming the focus in Time-Life publications and in national exhibits by the Smithsonian Institute and the Kansas Historical Society.  Since then the importance of the Halbe photograph collection has only grown.  Its impact on our county, state, regional, and national history cannot be overstated.

 

The significance of Halbe’s work has been best summed up by this Kansas Historical Society observation: “A brief interlude in a young man’s life, Leslie Halbe’s photography brilliantly captured a Kansas that is no more.” 

 

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SOURCES:

Wilson World, August 20, 1908; July 24, 1919; January 25, 1925.

 

Dorrance News, April 17, 1913.

 

Dorrance Star, October 9, 1913; December 20, 1917; September 20, 1918.

 

Lawrence Journal-World, July 17, 2005.

 

Ancestry.com. 1910 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2006.

 

Ancestry.com. 1920 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010. Images reproduced by FamilySearch.

 

Ancestry.com. 1930 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010. Images reproduced by FamilySearch.

 

Ancestry.com. 1940 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010. Images reproduced by FamilySearch.

 

Ancestry.com. U.S., World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2005.

 

Ancestry.com. U.S., Department of Veterans Affairs BIRLS Death File, 1850-2010 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011.

 

Ancestry.com. Missouri, Jackson County Marriage Records, 1840-1985 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2015.

 

www.findagrave.com/memorial/3796673, Leslie Winfield Halbe.

 

www.kansasmemory.org/item/213318, Leslie Winfield Halbe.

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All photographs courtesy of the Kansas State Historical Society, unless otherwise indicated.

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Top Photograph: Self-portrait by Leslie Halbe, 1908.