Thomas W. and Margaret K. Tenney Collection

Background on Thomas W. and Margaret K. Tenney

Biographical essay prepared by Will Tenney and produced as a booklet entitled "In Memoriam: Thomas Walker Tenney (1920-2012) and Margaret Whitney Kalw Tenney (1922-2011).

Thomas Walkter Tenney was born February 13, 1920 in Evanston, Illinois, son of Jeannette Walker and Dr. Horace Kent Tenney, Jr. His grandfather, Horace Kent Tenney, was a successful Chicago lawyer. Thos is descended from Thomas Tenney, an English immigrant and one of the founders of the town of Rowley, Massachusetts in 1638. Thos' paternal grandmother, Eleanor Burnside Favill Tenney, was descended through five generations of women from chief Kewiniquot of the Ottawa tribe of northern Michigan.

The Tenney family moved from Evanston to Madison, Wisconsin, in the early 1920s, where Dr. Tenney set up a pediatrics practice and started his long career as a professor at the University of Wisconsin. Thos grew up on Chadbourne Avenue, near the university. He was given a box camera at about the age of 10, a vest pocket Kodak when he was around 12, and by the time he was 15, he was using a sophisticated Leica camera. An avid sailor, he and his brothers, Hod and Baird, raced boats on Madison's Lake Mendota, winning several Inland Lake Yachting Association awards. He was also muscially talented, playing both the clarinet and the trumpet.

He graduated from West High School, and in 1937 entered Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Although he majored in history, Thos maintained his avid interst in photography and performed in both the band and orchestra throughout his college years. He also won medals as a sharpshooter and as a member of the fencing team.

Williams College, a school for men only, is conveniently located just a few miles from Bennington College, an exclusively women's school, which is just across the state line in Vermont. Their close proximity created quite a social scene between students of the two schools. It was at one of these social events that Thos met a young music and art student, Maggie Klaw. From that point on, as Thos would later say, he visited Bennington so often he could make the 18 mile trip up well-worn Route 7 with his eyes closed.

Upon graduation from Williams in 1941, Thos returned to Madison, where he worked for local photographer, Fritz Kaeser, as a general assistant doing darkroom work, portraits, and architectural photography. He also worked on his own, creating portraits and photographic works of art until he enlisted in the Navy on March 10, 1942. Following training in sound equipment and sonar technology at the U.S. Navy Fleet Sound School in San Diego, he served as a Soundman, defending the harbor at the Naval Operations Base on Adak Island, Alaska, from February, 1943 to July, 1944, when he was promoted to Ensign and was sent to New York to the officer's training program at Fort Schuyler in the Bronx.

Margaret Whitney Klaw was born May 30, 1922 in New York City, the daughter of Alma Ash and Alonzo Klaw, a painter and theatrical producer. Maggie's father was the son of Antoinette Morris and Marc Klaw, noted New York theater impresario and co-founder of the powerful Theatrical Syndicate. As a partner in Klaw and Erlanger, he built theaters throughout the United States, including the New Amsterdam Theater in Times Square. Marc Klaw was the son of Caroline Blumgart and Leopold Klau from Hamburg, Bavaria, who came to Cincinnati around 1846 and later settled in Paducah, Kentucky. Antoinette Morris Klaw was the daughter of Alonzo Morris of Boston, originally from Fort Erie, New York, an actor, theater owner, and producer famous for early blackface minstrelsy as part of Morris Brothers Minstrels. Maggie's mother Alma was the daughter of Rose Sternberger and Mark Ash, a New York lawyer and trustee of the New York Public Library, whose parents came from Posen, Prussia, now part of Poland.

Maggie grew up in New York City and on her father's farm, Almalon in Carmel, New York, where Alonzo painted and raised dairy cows. Each autumn during the 1920s and in to the 1930s, Maggie and her older brother, Spencer, would travel across the country in two cars with their parents and a governess to spend winters in Santa Barbara, California or Florida.

Maggie attended high school at Friends Semincary in New York City and graduated from Bennington College in 1942 with an emphasis on art and music. Following her graduation, she returned to New York where she held several jobs including a short stint at the New York Public Library, where he grandfather Mark Ash had been a trustee. Maggie kept up active correspondence with Thos while he was in the Navy stationed on the west coast and Alaska. At the time Thos was sent to the Bronx for officers' school, Maggie was living in her own apartment on 12th Street in New York.

On September 2, 1944, while on weekend leave from his training at Fort Schuyler, Thos and Maggie were married. Following his officer training in the Bronx, he was sent to Miami for further training. Maggie accompanied him, going by way of Madison for a few days, to Florida, where they lived until early February, 1945, when he was directed to the West Coast Sound School in San Diego. Maggie followed, making the three-day trip across the country by whatever means she could find. During wartime, this was quite a challenge.

By the end of March, 1945, Thos had been ordered to head back east to yet another school, this time the Destroyer Communication Officers' School in Portald, Maine. Following that, on June 1, Thos was assigned to the destroyer USS Gleaves in New York harbor. Maggie made her way back to New York from San Diego in April, and stayed in her mother's apartment at The Sulgrave on East 67th Street for the remainder of the War.

The USS Gleaves left New York in June, 1945, spending a little time in Guantanamo, Cuba, before passing through the Panama Canal and heading for Hawaii. The mission was to be part of an invasion fleet, but the events of August 1945 ended the war, making any further invasion of Japan unnecessary. Thos left the Gleaves in Saipan to return to the United States, geting back to New York in November.

Following their first son John's birth on December 14, 1945, they moved to Mineola on Long Island, where Thos worked for Storagewall, an innovative company which produced architect-designed strorage systems for modern houses. Within only a few months, the company transferred Thos to Springfield, Massachusetts, and the young family found a little house on Wilbraham Road in the Sixteen Acres district. But Storagewall was too far ahead of its time and it went bankrupt in March, 1948. A second son, Will, was born April 7, 1948. With the responsibilites of a growing family, he found employment with Rogers Plastic Corp. in North Wilbraham, working the night shift. By November of that year, he had found a new day job as a credit investigator for Dun and Bradstreet.

Not content with this line of work and having had a very tough time with the harsh New England winters in the Connecticut River Valley, Thos and Maggie dreamed up a plan to leave Springfield. Their plan was to move to the west coast and open a phonograph record store in a college town like Berkeley, Palo Alto, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, or even Seattle where Thos had spent some time during the War. They wanted it to be the kind of store in which they themselves would want to shop.

In the spring of 1950, they sold their Springfield house and bought an Anderson thirty-foot house trailer and a truck to pull it across the country. Their departure was delayed, however, by the sudden illness and death of Maggie's mother, Alma, in May. But by the summer of 1950, they were on the road. They stopped for a while in Madison and then spent some time in Aspen, Colorado visiting friends before arriving in California, finding temporary housing in a trailer park in El Cerrito while they searched for a store location. If they couldn't find the right place in Berkeley, the idea was that they would look next in Palo Alto, and keep on searching until they found the perfect situation. Fortunately, they almost immediately found a store for sale at 2984 College Avenue in the Elmwood section of Berkeley, about a mile from the UC Berkeley campus. They bought a Craftsman style bungalow at 6442 Colby Street, just over the line from Berkely in north Oakland. The store was soon remodeled by the prestigious Mid-Century architectural office of Roger Lee, and opened as Thos Tenney Music on Records. The design of the store, in a highly progressive style for the time, was very well received and featured in the local press.

During the early days of the store, Thos used his Navy experience as a sound engineer to get involved with the new publicly-supported radio station in Berkeley, KPFA, helping them with field recordings. This lead to a record-production venture, Thos Tenney Records, which produced several 10-inch LP records, including tales for children told by storyteller Josephine Gardner and the critically acclaimed "Scots Border Ballads" performed by George Emmerson, with jackets designed and illustrated by Bay Area artists, notably painter and sculptor Roger Bolomey.

Soon after settling in the Bay Area, Maggie began attending graduate school at Mills College in Oakland, studying musical composition with Darius Milhaud and others. She composed a number of pieces and had some of them performed. During her studies at Mills, Maggie met a number of other composition students and musicians, several of whom remained friends for the rest of her life.

When the city of Berkeley informed Thos and Maggie that their two sons could no longer attend Berkeley schools because their home was in Oakland, they began the process of looking for a house in Berkeley. In the summer of 1954, they moved to 1129 Euclid Avenue in North Berkeley, just up the hill from the Rose Garden. Major remodeling was done on the house while the family took a trip to Madison.

The mid- to late 1950s saw a change in the direction of the store, moving from the only selling records to the design and production of products for the emerging market for home hi-fi systems. Thos introduced systems with custom-built cabinets, using his experience with architectural cabinetry from his time at Storagewall. These consoles were recognized as being in the height of tasteful modern interior design.

From the time he joined the Navy through the establishment of his business, Thos did very little photography, save for family photos of vacations. But in 1960, he decided it was time to get back into photography more seriously, and he took some workshops with Brett Weston in Carmel. The experience changed his life, and Thos basically became a full-time photographer, turning over more of the day-to-day running of the store to members of his staff.

His first exhibition was at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1962, a group show, "The World Around Us," along with seven photographers, including Brett Weston and Imogen Cunningham. During this time, he also did darkroom work for noted photographer and neighbor, Dorothea Lange.

Maggie was incredibly sharp-witted with a wicked sense of humor. She loved limerick as a poetic form, especially the more naughty kind. She was a collector of unusual and humorous names. When she traveled, she would take time to go through local phone books in search of these quirky names, filling several notebooks over the years. While still a college student, she published a series of caricatures of college life for Glamour Magazine. Publishers made special note of her "acid-tipped pen."

Always an inventive and experimental visual artist, Maggie's work in collage and monoprint during the late 1950s and well into the 1960s reflected a strong surrealist influence. She often used torn posters and billboards, as well as bits of antique book illustrations, as the basis for her work, converting them into new and dynamic images. Her emerging color photography reflected a similarity of themes, often depicting signage and painted surfaces in various stages of decay.

Thos was spending more and more of his time devoted to photography which took a serious toll on the business, and the combination of insufficient oversight and stiff competition from larger chain stores forced the closure of the store in 1964.

The period leading up to the closing of the store had been extremely stressful for Thos and Maggie. In order to spend some quality time together, in 1964 they rented a cottage on one of the canals in Venice, California, and spent the better part of a year photographing the Los Angeles area, including a striking portfolio of the Watts Tower. Their time in Los Angeles was very fruitful as they both sharpened their focus photographically. Thos always shot in black and white while Maggie created color transparencies. Joint shows in Santa Barbara, Pasadena, and San Francisco over the next few years reflected the new direction that their work was taking, moslty images of signs, or "Pictures of Pictures."

Starting in 1963 and spreading over the next twelve years with many trips to the east coast, they developed an in-depth photographic study of New England gravestones. Their study concentrated on the aesthetic qualities rather than the purely historical aspects, capturing on film nearly the last remaining vestiages of Colonial era stone sculpture. Together they carefully studied and analyzed the gravestone images they brought home after each of their trips. Thos did photography and Maggie did much of the visual analysis, using her skills as a visual artist to make comparisions between stones from various carvers and regions. Hundreds of stones from Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont were catalogued, described, analyzed, and cross-referenced. Selections from this large body of work were shown in exhibitions at San Francisco's Bolles Gallery and Portland, Orgeon Art Museum.

During the late 60s, Thos photographed on assignment with the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Subjects included Joan Baue at her institute for the Study of Nonviolence in Carmel, Black Panthers in East Oakland, and increasingly political student activities at Berkeley.

Thos began to collect what he called "found photographs," old photos, daguerreotypes and tintypes, which he found at flea markets, yard sales, book stores, church fairs, etc. He bought thousands of loose photographs in shoe boxes, studio photographs, snap shots, prints, negatives, dozens of old photo albums: anything he could get his hand on, but with a caveat. He was looking for images which had that indefinable quality that transformed them from mere snapshots into meaningful photographs. From his acquisitions, he selected those he considered aesthetically worthy, and preserved them by carefully re-photographing them onto 4x5 film using a copy-camera of his own design made from his old Graflex Speed Graphic camera. He began to exhibit these in the mid 1970s, notably at the Focus Gallery in San Francisco.

Another project Thos and Maggie embarked on in the late 60s was a collection of images blown up from advertising cuts and junk-mail catalog pages. An exhibition of these images, "Certain Aspects of the American Dream in the Mid Nineteen Sixties" was shown in Richmond, California, and at the Sam's Café Gallery in Berkeley. Their last exhibit was in 1976, a group show at the Berkeley Art Center, "12 Berkeley Photographers," but Thos did not stop photographing or collecting.

After retiring from photography in the early 1980s, Maggie developed an international trade in eclectic antiquarian books with an emphasis on cooking, household management, and manners, and she amassed a large collection of books on these and other widely varied subjects.

Thos' last photographs were made in 2003, when cataracts began affecting his ability to work in the low light of the darkroom, and he was forced to retire.

Returning to his love of history, he spent much of his time reading the stories of the ancient Greeks. After Maggie's injury from a fall, they moved in February 2011 from their Berkeley house of over 50 years to an assisted-living facility in Lafayette, just east of Berkeley. They decided to move to Lafayette where they could be close to their son John, who would then be only minutes away. Maggie succumbed to a fast-moving cancer and died peacefully in her sleep on April 18, 2011. In the spring of 2012, Thos moved to a smaller assisted-living facility in Lafayette, where he passed away quietly after a brief illness on May 24, 2012.

Thomas Tenney Solo Exhibitions

Margaret and Thomas Tenney Joint Exhibitions