Fred G. Hill Papers

Fred Hill was born Frederick Grant Hill II, December 6, 1935, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and reared northwest of there, in Bartlesville. He entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953 but left after three and a half years without a degree, having failed the thermodynamics requirement. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1958. At Army Chemical Center (ACC), Maryland, he applied his novice technical writing skill to film scripts for the laboratories, and also fell in with an active little theatre group. At ACC was an enclave of college draftees, known for the putative fraternity Phi Tau Alpha (FTA). Hill learned useful skills of lighting, performed and impromptu skit on stage that drew chuckles from the audience, and wrote a short play that was later produced at MIT.

In 1960 he worked as a chemical technician for Cabot Corporation, Boston, took an interest in photography, and in 1965 apprenticed at Mel Goldman Studio, a Boston commercial photographer. In 1970, he moved with his wife and infant son to South Burlington, Vermont, and started his own commercial photography business. He was divorced in 1977. His son became an M.D. general practitioner in Wisconsin.

In 1979 and again in 1981 he was burned out of studios in downtown Burlington (once by arson). The third studio, though, was charmed: five second-floor rooms with attic at 165 Cherry Street. The main room accommodated the studio work; a permanent setup in the copy room handled large art works with ease; the attic provided space for macrophotography. Best of all, he built the nearly perfect darkroom.

His business, primarily advertising and industrial photography, in-studio and on location, included reproduction (copy) photography of various kinds, and he made ID/passport photos for public and commercial customers. Other portraiture, not one of his skills, was rare but not turned down. For a few years, wedding photography was a necessary filler. His customer base was a broad sample of Vermont manufacturing, retail, financial, recreational, hospitality, printing, service industries, artists and craftspeople; he did charitable work for social agencies. He won two Pegasus awards for Ad Photography, and his photographs were used in a great number and variety of local publications. Over 39 years, he has had five exhibits of personal photography.

For the Burlington Bicentennial celebration in 1991, he was commissioned to emulate the panoramic "community portrait" taken by L.L. McAlllister of Bastille Day, 1918. Unlike McAllister’s large bellows camera, panoramic cameras in 1991 were small, portable, and less capable; nor did Hill have McAllister’s experience. But he rented one, practiced a bit, kept the crowd back far enough, and took the thing from a truckbed. Easier than expected, it was almost as much fun as the week he spent photographing the Brobdingnagian facilities at Express Foods (the former whey plant) in Georgia, VT.

The 1918 crowd had seemed resigned to a long ordeal. The crowd of 1991 was less somber, more mobile, and thinned out rapidly after only one roll of film. It was also smaller, despite lavish advance publicity provided by The Burlington Free Press. Enthusiasm was high, though, and technical characteristics of the photograph approximated McAllister’s. The result was "pretty good considering."

Sales of prints and a poster recouped all the Bicentennial expenses. (9x39 inch prints and 30x40 posters, which incorporated both the 1918 and 1991 photos, sold for the same $25.) Hill had already resigned his business in 1989, having acceded to a recent influx of commercial photographers, more than usually skilled and more vigorous at establishing their business than Hill was at maintaining his. He did, however, help to draw them into a short-lived Society of Vermont Photographers, in which he served as the Secretary and Treasurer. He was a founding member of the Vermont chapter of the Graphic Artists Guild.

From 1991 to 2003, he worked at the Fletcher Free Library, Burlington, as a Circulation Clerk and Interlibrary Loan operative. Retiring in 2003, he continued to volunteer there for another six years – a good place.

Hill used his middle initial, G, to avoid confusion with a slew of other Vermont Fred Hills. He was not, nor is he related to: the beloved, longtime Milton schoolteacher/principal (deceased), nor the well-liked former owner/operator of the Burlington Country Club (Fred C., also known for photography), nor the former owner of Hill Hayes Advertising Agency, nor yet the coal/oil dealer in Randolph, nor the mysterious one or several Fred Hills who surface now and then around Waterbury. To be definite, he is not related to any other Vermont resident at all, although an ancestor from Canada seems to have settled near Rochester and married a distant niece of John Greenleaf Whittier; and two maternal ancestors reportedly once worked near Rutland. Alas for hopes of avoiding confusion, the initial G helped little.

Privately, Hill was an obsessed accumulator of stuff. In particular, he carefully preserved his negatives, extra prints, work journals, and billing ledgers with a view to prosperity. While organizing them, he was disappointed to encounter the dread color deterioration: Slides and transparencies a mere 25 years old are going off-color; many older ones are entirely useless. The black-and-white materials, though, even from 1964, were found to be pristine. Ah, black-and-white! Alas, that even it will one day be legend! [Autobiography provided by Fred G. Hill]

Hill died on April 17, 2018.