1. Restless Child

Abstract

1. Restless Child Bill Broyles (bio) If you were the son of the "father of television," how would your life have turned out? Who would you have become? Would you be someone other than who you are today? Let's find out. Hello, Ronald Ives. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1909, into an eccentric family. And like many rebellious children, the more he tried to be different than his parents, the more he mirrored them. Frederic Eugene Ives Ives's grandfather, Frederic Eugene Ives (1856–1937), was a pioneer inventor of major importance and held more than 70 patents and received more than 20 medals of excellence awarded by scientific and technical [End Page 229] societies. He specialized in photography, optics, and printing. In 1878, his was the first use of color-sensitive photographic plates in commercial photography and the first practical process for making halftone plates. He worked successfully on transmission of photos by telegram, three-color halftones, panchromatic photo plates, photogravure and rotogravure printing, and infrared photography. He developed the first trichromatic camera, the stereoscopic photochromoscope, and the Kromolinskop, which was a forerunner of the Kodacolor motion picture process. He developed the modern binocular microscope, the trichromatic colorimeter, a tint photometer to standardize color charts, and various dye packs for film. He had a hand in modern motion picture film and he perfected the polychrome process of color photography. Frederic Ives descended from William Ives, a landed gentryman who came from England to America in 1635 and first settled in Boston and then New Haven, Connecticut, in 1638. The family tree included Joseph Christmas Ives (explorer, 1829–1868), James Merritt Ives (artist of Currier and Ives, 1824–1895), and Charles Ives (musician, 1874–1954), though we have no information that Ronald's immediate family knew these distant relatives. Frederic's father, Hubert Leverit Ives (1833–1868), was a farmer in Litchfield, Connecticut, and he married Ellen A. Beach in 1855. Ellen's family was also from England, but both were originally Norman French. Frederic, the eldest child, had two sisters and three brothers, one who died in infancy. At age 13 he was apprenticed to a newspaper printer, at 19 he was director of Cornell University's first photographic laboratory, and at 25 he ran his own business in Philadelphia. He invented and made halftone printing plates. Later he formed the Ives Kromskop Company that helped launch color photography.5 Frederic was stern and hardworking. His great-granddaughter, Jacqueline Beyer Webster, recounts family lore about Frederic. "He had a job as clerk in a country store which only allowed for two hours sleep a night. This was considered normal working conditions at the time, but he couldn't take it. The other tale about him is that he was considered slow, as he didn't talk until he was five or six. When his first words were 'Be so kind as to pass the butter,' nobody batted an eyelash or commented on it—they passed the butter. There is conjecture that someone sneered at his first babbling, so he practiced by himself 'til he was sure he would not be mocked."6 In Frederic's version, one of his earliest memories was "of my chagrin at being made sport of by a clownish farmer.... I did not commence to talk as soon as children do when there are other children [End Page 230] in the family, but [I] astonished my parents one day by suddenly beginning to talk in long sentences 'like a grown-up.' "7 His childhood was unusual by modern American standards, but for his time it was not atypical: a young boy put to work as an apprentice or paid employee as soon as he is able—sometimes as early as age 9 or 10—schooled only occasionally, and expected to become independent in his early teens, with little family support or affection. The Ives family valued hard work, independence, and rigid morality, while dismissing affection, emotions, play, or luxury, a pattern we later see in Frederic's son Herbert and grandson Ronald. First Frederic worked for his father on the family farm and, when Frederic was 10, his father became a country...