Sawyer's, Inc. was an American manufacturer and retailer of

slide projector A slide projector is an opto-mechanical device for showing photographic slides. 35 mm slide projectors, direct descendants of the larger-format magic lantern, first came into widespread use during the 1950s as a form of occasional home ...

s, scenic slides,

View-Master View-Master is the trademark name of a line of special-format stereoscopes and corresponding View-Master "reels", which are thin cardboard disks containing seven Stereoscopic 3-D pairs of small transparent color photographs on film.Mary Ann & Wo ...

reels and viewers, postcards, and related products, based in

Portland, Oregon Portland (, ) is a port city in the Pacific Northwest and the largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon. Situated at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, Portland is the county seat of Multnomah County, the most populou ...

. Founded in 1914 as a photo-finishing company, Sawyer's began producing and selling View-Masters in 1939, and that soon became its primary product. It later diversified into other photographic products, mostly related to film transparencies, and established manufacturing plants in Europe, Japan and India. By the early 1960s, Sawyer's was the nation's second-largest manufacturer of slide projectors, and by 1965 slide projectors had surpassed View-Master reels and equipment as a percentage of the company's annual sales. In 1951, the company moved from Portland proper to the unincorporated

Progress Progress is the movement towards a refined, improved, or otherwise desired state. In the context of progressivism, it refers to the proposition that advancements in technology, science, and social organization have resulted, and by extension w ...

area in Portland's southwestern suburbs. In 1966, Sawyer's was acquired by New York-based General Aniline & Film (GAF), and its product lines and facilities were taken over by GAF. It was a subsidiary company of GAF until 1968, when it became simply a division of that company, renamed the GAF Consumer Photo Division. For several years thereafter, GAF used "Sawyer's" as a

brand A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that distinguishes one seller's good or service from those of other sellers. Brands are used in business, marketing, and advertising for recognition and, importantly, to create a ...

name for its slide projectors.

Early years

Sawyer's was founded in

, in 1914 by Carleton Sawyer and A. R. Specht as a photo-finishing service. Specht was a Portland executive in the

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

-based

Owl Drug Company The Owl Drug Company was an American drugstore retailer with its headquarters in San Francisco. It was a subsidiary of Rexall stores at its peak in the 1920s through 1940s. The company sold medicines and pills, and later ventured into cosmetics, ...

chain. Owl Drug's Portland store was the chain's third-busiest, and Specht hoped to capitalize on the public's growing use of cameras by making Owl Drug a convenient source of photo-finishing services for Portlanders. In mid-1919, Edwin E. Mayer, a camera enthusiast who had just graduated from the North Pacific College of Pharmacy (in Portland), bought out Carleton Sawyer's stake in the company bearing his name. Later the same year, Mayer and three relatives acquired the remaining stake from A. R. Specht. According to a 1946 article in ''

The Oregonian ''The Oregonian'' is a daily newspaper based in Portland, Oregon, United States, owned by Advance Publications. It is the oldest continuously published newspaper on the U.S. west coast, founded as a weekly by Thomas J. Dryer on December 4, 18 ...

'', "For 20 years Mayer retained membership in the

pharmaceutical A medication (also called medicament, medicine, pharmaceutical drug, medicinal drug or simply drug) is a drug used to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent disease. Drug therapy ( pharmacotherapy) is an important part of the medical field and ...

ranks, but never practiced his profession," working instead on building up the photofinishing business of Sawyer's. In 1924, the company was occupying a , two-story building on SW 20th Avenue, next to Multnomah Field in central Portland. By that time, the company had begun producing photographic

postcard A postcard or post card is a piece of thick paper or thin cardboard, typically rectangular, intended for writing and mailing without an envelope. Non-rectangular shapes may also be used but are rare. There are novelty exceptions, such as wood ...

s and souvenir photo sets. As business grew, the company purchased an adjacent two-story building on SW Ella Street (now 20th Place) for expansion. In 1926, Harold J. Graves joined the company. He had served a long stint as a U.S. Army photographer and then operated photo shops in

Salem Salem may refer to: Places Canada Ontario * Bruce County ** Salem, Arran–Elderslie, Ontario, in the municipality of Arran–Elderslie ** Salem, South Bruce, Ontario, in the municipality of South Bruce * Salem, Dufferin County, Ontario, part ...

and

Eugene, Oregon Eugene ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Oregon. It is located at the southern end of the Willamette Valley, near the confluence of the McKenzie and Willamette rivers, about east of the Oregon Coast. As of the 2020 United States Census ...

, before buying a stake in Sawyer's. Graves handled

marketing Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to empha ...

for the company's products while Mayer ran the business. Later, photographic

greeting card A greeting card is a piece of card stock, usually with an illustration or photo, made of high quality paper featuring an expression of friendship or other sentiment. Although greeting cards are usually given on special occasions such as birthda ...

s marketed to major

department store A department store is a retail establishment offering a wide range of consumer goods in different areas of the store, each area ("department") specializing in a product category. In modern major cities, the department store made a dramatic app ...

s were added to the Sawyer's product line. Sawyer's was the nation's largest producer of scenic

s in the 1920s. Mayer remained the company's general manager for more than three decades, until his death in 1956 from a heart attack.

View-Master introduction

The company took the first steps towards developing the

stereoscope A stereoscope is a device for viewing a stereoscopic pair of separate images, depicting left-eye and right-eye views of the same scene, as a single three-dimensional image. A typical stereoscope provides each eye with a lens that makes the ima ...

after a chance meeting, at the Oregon Caves in 1938, between Graves and William Gruber, an organ maker of German origin trained by Welte & Sons and an avid photographer, living in Portland. The View-Master used disk-shaped "reels" which are thin cardboard disks containing seven stereoscopic 3-D pairs of small color photographs on film, and its individual eyepieces immersed the viewer into the scene more fully than previous stereoscopes. Mayer and Gruber had both developed devices for viewing stereo images, but Gruber had developed the idea of mounting tiny pieces of

Kodachrome Kodachrome is the brand name for a color reversal film introduced by Eastman Kodak in 1935. It was one of the first successful color materials and was used for both cinematography and still photography. For many years Kodachrome was widely used ...

color transparency film into reels made from heavy paper stock, for viewing in a stereo slide viewer designed for the reels. Gruber partnered with the owners of Sawyer's to develop the invention. In late 1939, the View-Master was introduced at the New York World's Fair (marked "Patent Applied For"). It was intended as an alternative to the scenic postcard, and was originally sold at photography shops,

stationery Stationery refers to commercially manufactured writing materials, including cut paper, envelopes, writing implements, continuous form paper, and other office supplies. Stationery includes materials to be written on by hand (e.g., letter paper ...

stores, and scenic-attraction gift shops. The main subjects of the first View-Master reels were Carlsbad Caverns and the

Grand Canyon The Grand Canyon (, yuf-x-yav, Wi:kaʼi:la, , Southern Paiute language: Paxa’uipi, ) is a steep-sided canyon carved by the Colorado River in Arizona, United States. The Grand Canyon is long, up to wide and attains a depth of over a ...

. The View-Master was marketed through the photo-finishing, postcard, and greeting-card company, Sawyer's, Inc. The partnership led to the retail sales of View-Master viewers and disks. The patent on the viewing device was issued in 1940, on what came to be called the Model A viewer. Within a very short time, the View-Master took over the postcard business as Sawyer's biggest and most profitable product area. The company continued to make other photographic products, however, including about 30 million postcards per year and about 1.5 million photographic greeting cards per year. By 1942, Sawyer's was selling its products through almost 1,000 retail outlets nationwide. It was manufacturing about 250,000 View-Master viewers per year by the mid-1940s. In 1945–46, the company added two newly constructed two-story buildings to its complex on and near SW 20th Avenue. As of spring 1946, the company was employing about 100 people, but a factory expansion under way at that time was due to increase that figure by about 75 when completed.

Factory relocation and expansion

In 1951, the company moved its headquarters and production facilities from its longtime Portland location near Multnomah Stadium to a new complex built on a site in the then-unincorporated area known as

, between Beaverton and Tigard and in the southwestern suburbs of the

Portland metropolitan area The Portland metropolitan area is a metro area in the U.S. states of Oregon and Washington centered on the principal city of Portland, Oregon. The U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) identifies it as the Portland–Vancouver–Hillsboro ...

. The site was located along a

Spokane, Portland & Seattle Railway The Spokane, Portland & Seattle Railway (SP&S) was a railroad in the northwest United States. Incorporated in 1905, it was a joint venture by the Great Northern Railway and the Northern Pacific Railway to build a railroad along the north bank of ...

line and adjacent to Oregon Highway 217. Stereocraft Engineering, a Portland firm that had been producing specialized machinery for Sawyer's since 1946, built its own new plant adjoining the new Sawyer's plant in Progress. Coll

Also in 1951, Sawyer's purchased Tru-Vue, a producer of stereoscopic film strips that had been the main competitor of the View-Master product line. In addition to eliminating its main rival, the takeover also gave Sawyer's Tru-Vue's licensing rights to Walt Disney Studios. Sawyer's capitalized on the opportunity and produced numerous reels featuring Disney characters. The takeover would pay off further in 1955, with reels of the newly opened

Disneyland Disneyland is a theme park in Anaheim, California. Opened in 1955, it was the first theme park opened by The Walt Disney Company and the only one designed and constructed under the direct supervision of Walt Disney. Disney initially envisi ...

. The Tru-Vue Company was a subsidiary of Sawyer's, Inc. Through the 1950s Sawyer's successively introduced new models of its View-Master viewer. Sawyer's introduced the View-Master Personal Stereo Camera in 1952. The camera allowed amateurs to create their own View-Master reels. Most fabrication work on the new camera was carried out by Stereocraft Engineering, the established Sawyer's contractor that had followed Sawyer's in its move to a larger work site in the suburbs. Within two years, the Personal camera had spawned the introduction of a 3-D projector, the Stereomatic 500. A conventional

still camera A camera is an optical instrument that can capture an image. Most cameras can capture 2D images, with some more advanced models being able to capture 3D images. At a basic level, most cameras consist of sealed boxes (the camera body), with a ...

named the Nomad was introduced by Sawyer's in 1956, with models for two different film formats:

127 127 may refer to: *127 (number), a natural number *AD 127, a year in the 2nd century AD *127 BC, a year in the 2nd century BC *127 (band), an Iranian band See also *List of highways numbered 127 Route 127 or Highway 127 can refer to multiple roads ...

and

620 __NOTOC__ Year 620 ( DCXX) was a leap year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. The denomination 620 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era ...

Diversification and overseas expansion

Sawyer's established a European subsidiary named Sawyer's Europe in 1952, in a newly built facility in

Sint-Niklaas Sint-Niklaas (; french: Saint-Nicolas, ) is a Belgian city and municipality located in the Flemish province of East Flanders. The municipality comprises the city of Sint-Niklaas proper and the towns of Belsele, Nieuwkerken-Waas, and . Sint-N ...

, Belgium, and expanded the factory in 1964. It established three other foreign subsidiaries in 1958, in Sydney, Australia (Sawyer's Inc. Australia Pty. Ltd.);

Tokyo Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and List of cities in Japan, largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, ...

, Japan; and France. The French company was a subsidiary of Sawyer's Europe and was named View-Master S.A. Sawyer's Rotomatic slide projector

During the late 1950s the company began manufacturing

s (for conventional 2x2-inch slides), viewers for conventional slides and scenic slide sets. By 1961, slide projectors had become Sawyers' second-most-profitable product. A new model introduced in 1963 was known as the Sawyer's Rotomatic and used upright circular trays, called Rototrays, to hold the slides (100 per tray). Sales totaled $8.6 million in 1961 and $9.1 million in 1962. New products introduced in 1962 included a dictation machine. The company's workforce numbered about 300 in January 1960, but within two years it had more than doubled, to 687 at the beginning of February 1962. Sawyer's was the second-largest U.S. manufacturer of slide projectors in the early and mid-1960s, second only to

Eastman Kodak The Eastman Kodak Company (referred to simply as Kodak ) is an American public company that produces various products related to its historic basis in analogue photography. The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, and is incorpor ...

, which had introduced the Carousel slide projector in the early 1960s and patented it in 1965. A 1965 ''Oregonian'' article stated that Sawyer's was "one of the two largest U.S. manufacturers of slide projectors and related items, running neck and neck with Kodak, according to industry sources." A portable projection table was introduced in 1964. The company's main plant, in Progress, was employing 800 people. The number of dealers selling View-Master products had grown to about 9,000. Sawyer's made its first public offering of stock in 1962, and a second offering was made three years later. In 1965, the View-Master product line represented 37 percent of the company's sales, whereas slide projectors and accessories accounted for 43 percent. Sales of slides, slide viewers, Tru-Vue

stereoscopic Stereoscopy (also called stereoscopics, or stereo imaging) is a technique for creating or enhancing the illusion of depth in an image by means of stereopsis for binocular vision. The word ''stereoscopy'' derives . Any stereoscopic image is ...

viewers and various other products made up the remainder of sales. Total sales for the fiscal year ending in April 1965 was reported to be $19.3 million, and amounted to $26 million (equivalent to $ million in ) in the following fiscal year. A

movie projector A movie projector is an opto- mechanical device for displaying motion picture film by projecting it onto a screen. Most of the optical and mechanical elements, except for the illumination and sound devices, are present in movie cameras. Mo ...

for use with the then-new

Super 8 film Super 8 mm film is a motion-picture film format released in 1965 by Eastman Kodak as an improvement over the older "Double" or "Regular" 8 mm home movie format. The film is nominally 8 mm wide, the same as older formatted ...

was introduced as a new Sawyer's product around early 1965. Sawyer model g view-master viewer

In 1965, the company was manufacturing 2,000 projectors a day, and daily production of View-Master reels had grown from a recent norm of 50,000 to as many as 160,000 on peak days. In addition to its own name, Sawyer's sold its products under the

names View-Master, Tru-Vue and Pana-Vue, with sales throughout the U.S. and in more than 100 foreign countries. Some of its foreign sales and manufacturing were made through subsidiary companies. Largest of these was Sawyer's Europe, S.A., which was 57.5% owned by the parent company in the U.S. and had a workforce of about 200. It recorded sales of $2.7 million in fiscal year 1965, while a wholly owned Japanese subsidiary and a 49-percent-owned Indian affiliate collectively recorded a comparatively small total of $100,000 in sales for the same period. Sales in Canada represented 5 percent of the company's gross sales.

Acquisition by GAF

In June 1966, the owners of Sawyer's Inc. revealed that they were considering selling the company to General Aniline & Film Corp. (GAF), of New York and formerly German-owned, and that the two companies had been negotiating on and off since July 1965. A deal was finalized in October 1966, and Sawyer's Inc. was sold to GAF on October 31, 1966. The manufacturing facilities and workforce in the Progress area, in the southwestern suburbs of the Portland metropolitan area, were retained by GAF. Sawyers, Inc. became a wholly owned GAF subsidiary registered in

Delaware Delaware ( ) is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States, bordering Maryland to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and New Jersey and the Atlantic Ocean to its east. The state takes its name from the adjacen ...

, rather than Oregon, but initially continued to be managed by Robert Brost, president of Sawyer's since 1959, who was to remain in Portland. However, eventually operations were folded into GAF, with the former subsidiary being renamed as GAF's Consumer Photo Division in 1968. General Aniline and Film Corp., as opposed to "GAF", had remained that company's formal name until April 1968, when it was changed to

GAF Corporation GAF is an American manufacturing company based in Parsippany, New Jersey, that has roots dating back to the late 19th century. The GAF acronym stands for General Aniline & Film. The company has historically been primarily focused on manufacturi ...

.. For several years after that change, GAF used "Sawyer's" as a

name for some of its slide projectors.GAF advertisement
in ''

New York New York most commonly refers to: * New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York * New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States New York may also refer to: Film and television * '' ...

'' magazine, November 25, 1974, p. 59. Retrieved 2016-06-04. GAF's Progress factory continued to do well and even expand in the years following the transfer of ownership, but after a peak employment of 1,700 at the site in 1973 the workforce size declined to around 1,200 by 1976. It had fallen to about 1,000 by mid-1977, when

layoff A layoff or downsizing is the temporary suspension or permanent termination of employment of an employee or, more commonly, a group of employees (collective layoff) for business reasons, such as personnel management or downsizing (reducing the ...

s of 400 were announced, which would reduce it to 600. A decline in the demand for projectors was cited as a key factor. At that time, ''The Oregonian'' newspaper reported that the ex-Sawyer's plant in Progress was "the only domestic operation that produces movie and slide projectors". In announcing the layoffs in July 1977, GAF said it would be selling its projector-manufacturing operations and would also be discontinuing the manufacture and sales of consumer films, cameras and color paper.

References

External links

* {{FormerORCompanies 1914 establishments in Oregon 1968 disestablishments in Oregon Companies based in Portland, Oregon Companies based in Washington County, Oregon Manufacturing companies established in 1914 Manufacturing companies disestablished in 1968 Office supply companies of the United States Photography companies of the United States Postcard publishers Stereoscopic photography 1966 mergers and acquisitions Defunct manufacturing companies based in Oregon