Profits from Whittling

 Profits fromWhittling 

IN 1915 , A. O. Dinsdale (O’Dee to his friends) was an ambitious young man who had just been graduated from the California School of Fine Arts and the Berkeley School of Arts and Crafts. He was determined to become a painter equaling Michelangelo. But the war changed all that. After serving in France, Dinsdale returned to San Francisco restless and unsettled. He went up into the high Sierras and isolated himself in a crude cabin twenty miles upgrade. Here he aimlessly whittled out queer little animals and painted them. A hunter chancing on his retreat saw these animals and chuckled. “They’ve got personality,” he said. “Send ’em down to the art shops. They’ll sell.” Dinsdale followed this advice and his animals became a fad. He grew so busy painting pink elephants and purple lions that he had no time to bemoan shattered ambitions. Returning to town he purchased a band saw and cut his creatures out of three-ply pine, painting them in oils. Because his art education had included a thorough study of anatomy, his animals were proportionately right despite their whimsicalities and gaudy hues. Business expanded. In his garage he worked out nursery interiors and store displays: “The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe,” for instance, for a juvenile shoe department. Dinsdale called his workshop the O’Dee Studio and designed a black cat and blackbird trade-mark because his recently acquired wife considered black cats “good luck.” Years passed. Today the O’Dee Studio is located downtown and equipped with the latest machinery. Animals have been left far behind in Dinsdale’s “March of Progress.” His unusual profession takes in decorative relief maps for vast projects, mechanical displays timed to light and sound, caricatures, and unusual animated exhibits. Strange assignments come to Dinsdale, one of these being his group of historical displays created for the Wells Fargo Bank Museum. True to scale and history these dramatic tableaux in wood vie in interest with the valuable collection of relics bearing on California’s frontier days. One, for example, has for its setting Sutter’s Mill, where gold was first discovered, and shows in five scenes the evolution of mining implements from crude pan and shovel to effective hydraulic methods. The superbly painted scene, correct in every detail, is enlivened by quaint figures of Indians, miners, Spanish caballeros, and others, each true to type and costume. A clipper ship assignment was a hard nut to crack because these ships, which used to carry mail round the Horn, are out of existence. Dinsdale spent days talking to old waterfront characters and nothing has been omitted either from his clipper ship education or from the finished model. But his greatest interest lies in synchronizing sound with movement in mechanical displays. He built the first Christmas window of this type in San Francisco: “Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf” acted out while a phonograph played the song. Delighted crowds almost blocked traffic. But this is only a crude beginning to Dinsdale who is working with a radio engineer on sound controlled mechanics. Future animated displays will not be timed to phonograph records, he predicts; they will be moved by actual sound vibrations.