Reviews

we are thrilled with this review of our book by the editor of STEREOVIEW MAGAZINE***********************************************************
review by John Dennis

Many biographies of stereo photography pioneers are able to provide little more than the most basic information about their subjects’ private thoughts, romantic interests or political beliefs, with much of the information mined from old business directories, patent applications and scraps of letters and records family members may have kept. But the story of View-Master inventor William B. Gruber brackets the mid 20th century, and with access to living family and friends, plus Gruber’s many surviving diaries and letters, his daughter has been able to research her subject more thoroughly and deeply than any outsider could have hoped to do.

In View Master - The Biography of William B. Gruber, Gretchen Jane Gruber has provided an astoundingly detailed and intimate look into her father’s life from his childhood in Germany to his emigration to Portland, Oregon to his development of the View-Master. If there was any temptation to gloss over unpleasant or troublesome aspects of that life, the urge certainly appears to have been successfully resisted.

Some previous accounts in books and articles about William Gruber have mentioned that he was accused of espionage by the FBI in 1942, but subsequently exonerated. The story is of course deeper and more complex than that, with five chapters in the book covering his long political evolution and including sometimes disturbing, sometimes moving passages from his own writings. William Gruber was, in fact, an enthusiastic, armband wearing Nazi for a time, starting in 1921 when he joined the party in Munich and attended Hitler’s early speeches. In 1919, he had been forced to join the “Red Army” during post-war street fighting in Munich that ended the brief rule of the Bavarian Soviet Republic (a key event in the German Revolution of 1918-19). He only escaped with his life by running as fast as he could, finding sanctuary in a building of the Steinheil Optical Company. The experience may have permanently influenced his political thinking.

Settling in Portland in 1925, his piano tuning work brought him into the homes of some of Portland’s elite. His passionate defense of Hitler and Germany, and his outspoken anti-Semitism seem to have caused fewer problems for his business and social life than one would expect from the perspective of today, but they did set the stage for serious problems later. In 1933 he became head of The Friends of New Germany branch in Portland, an off-shoot of the German-American Bund, but quit the next year as his entrepreneurial zeal began to overtake his interest in politics. A 1935 visit to his family in Germany initiated some disillusionment with Hitler, a process that discussions with close friends in Portland and the beginning of war in Europe would accelerate. As with so many early supporters of Hitler (and Gruber was in some illustrious, if often opportunistic company here), most expressions of even mild sympathy ended with the U.S. declaration of war with Germany in 1941.

The story of his dreams for a completely new stereoscope based on reels holding seven 16mm transparency pairs is told here in more detail than any previous history, including of course the pivotal 1938 encounter with Harold Graves of Sawyer’s at the Oregon Caves and the part played by his wife Norma. Just how everything came into place to allow production and sales of the View-Master in time for the 1939 fairs in New York and San Francisco is covered, as is the irony of how a failed attempt to order lenses for the first View-Masters from the Steinheil Optical Company in Munich would give the FBI just the evidence it needed to initiate the process of revoking his U.S. citizenship (“denaturalization”) in 1942. The story of how Gruber survived that episode (including a brief “exile” in Idaho), is one of several dramatic high points in the book, with all of it happening at the same time View-Master was producing 100,000 viewers and nearly six million training reels for the United States War Department!

The biography makes it clear through multiple examples how America was an ideal fit for a determined self-starter like Gruber - his love for his adapted country enhanced by natural wonders like the Columbia River Gorge, Mount Hood and others surrounding Portland. The amazing success of View-Master following the war years is told from a personal and family point of view. The author points readers to existing books and groups (like the NSA) that provide details of View-Master technical history and collecting information. And in fact there are no stereos in the book, which contains only flat photos from various periods in Gruber’s life. The stories behind his now highly collectible View-Master illustrated books on wildflowers, mushrooms, Chinese art and human anatomy document his passion for these subjects and his desire that the View-Master become a valued educational tool.

View Master reveals William Gruber to have been so much more than a piano tuner who tinkered with a new stereoscope design. To describe his life as often filled with drama would be an understatement. That he brought much of that drama on himself makes the book a more facinating read.