Cruise of the Pintail

The late Fonville Winans is well known as a portrait and wedding photographer who maintained a studio on Laurel Street in Baton Rouge for many years. A lesser-known side of his work is showcased in Cruise of the Pintail, a book released by LSU Press in September.

Born in Missouri and raised in Texas, Fonville first came to Louisiana as a young man of eighteen—and promptly fell in love.

That was in 1930, when he worked with his engineer father to build a bridge near Morgan City. A member of the carpentry crew, Fonville took along a camera and documented the flora and fauna of this mysterious new place that captured his imagination with its lush, tropical landscape.

“Louisiana was my Africa, my South America,” he once said.

That first impression drew him back to Louisiana. Seeking adventure and possibly fortune, he traveled the southern part of the state in a leaky boat in 1932, documenting his adventures in still photographs, on 16mm film, and in a surprisingly detailed diary for a young man of twenty.

Fonville’s son Robert (Bob) Winans edited the Pintail diary and selected the numerous photos that illustrate it. James Turner, who is married to Fonville’s daughter Meriget, wrote an introduction and supplemental material for the book.

“Fonville worked on the bridge project with his dad in 1930 and 1931,” says Turner. “He bought the boat, the Pintail, in 1931. It was a wooden trawler, possibly an oyster boat. It had a little cabin. It had a stabilizing sail, but he mostly used a Star automobile engine that had no clutch and no reverse.”

Fonville’s plan was to travel the waterways of Louisiana and record the journey. He enlisted two friends, Bob Owen and Don Horridge, as crew (charging them fifty dollars apiece for the privilege!). He had white uniforms made with the name Pintail and a logo of a pintail duck embroidered on the shirts.

In June 1932, the crew left Texas in a battered Model T Ford and drove to Morgan City, where they repaired and painted the boat. After a trial cruise into the Atchafalaya River, they set out for New Orleans, where they almost immediately met with calamity—Fonville turned his back for a few minutes and his still camera was stolen.

But he still had his hand-cranked 16mm camera, and he documented just about everything he saw: vendors and customers haggling in the exotic French Market, shaded courtyards in the French Quarter, men in straw hats and ladies carrying parasols on Canal Street. He and his friends lounged on the grounds of Jackson Square, eating candy and feeding the pigeons, and took a nighttime stroll through the infamous red-light district Storyville.

After a few days in New Orleans, inspired by reading Lyle Saxon’s Lafitte the Pirate, they sailed to Grand Isle, where Barataria Bay meets the Gulf of Mexico. There Fonville documented palmetto groves, oyster fishermen, moss pickers, shack-like houses, the post office and grocery store, the Oleander Hotel where summer guests stayed. With a pair of binoculars he fashioned a makeshift telephoto lens to shoot camera-shy pelicans.

He sent stories and photos to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, where he had briefly worked as a photographer. Ever resourceful, he found a way to process film under primitive conditions. “I converted the cabin into a dark room and printed more photographs, but the prints turned brown in the developer,” he wrote. “This may have been caused by traces of salt water. However, I will be able to get splendid prints from the negatives when I return home.”

High-spirited and adventurous, the crew was also disciplined. They regularly swabbed the deck of the Pintail and bailed out the water that seeped in through hard-to-find leaks. They washed and ironed their uniforms and did their best to stay clean and presentable.

That wasn’t easy, considering the pesky tasks of plugging leaks and tugging the boat off sandbars. Of one such ordeal, Fonville wrote, “We waded side by side and due to the glowing phosphorous caused by our plodding we could see each other plainly and looking down we could see the dark outline of our feet surging through the green fire. Now and then a crab scuttled to one side, lighting its way plainly with this strange fire. Fish made paths of light past our feet, sometimes striking us and streaking away at an angle. When the shrimp chose to flip themselves from the surface a large patch of water would be set aglow with the greenish light. Watching this weird phenomenon was of unending interest.”

They fished, crabbed and trolled for oysters, and Fonville often cooked. “This morning we arose early and caught a mess of sea crabs which I prepared for breakfast. . . . first, the crabs are boiled alive, and the delicate, sweet meat is picked out. Then I prepare a brown gravy with onions, a dash of salt, pepper, hot sauce, and catsup. Onto this I pour and mix the crab meat and allow to simmer for a few moments. And this dish is really good.”

A continuing theme is the endless battle with mosquitoes, which tortured them in the boat’s cabin (despite mosquito netting), at the camp of friends, at the local dance pavilion, and in the Model T. “We took turns, one tinkering [with the car engine] while the other retreated behind the car windows from the ravages of the tortuous insects. We cussed them with every breath, condemning them to hot places and calling them unconventional names, and calling their kindred like names also.”

Their pockets were often empty. “We ran out of money yesterday, excepting a nickel, so in order not to be inconvenienced in eating matters until more money arrived, we carried Bob’s shot gun along with us to a promising grocery store in the woods and established our credit for a week. We didn’t hold up the man, we simply hocked the gun to him.”

They often visited the Sea Breeze dance pavilion on the island, but Fonville watched more than he danced, because he couldn’t afford the seventy-five-cent admission fee. When he could afford it, he was often baffled by the island girls.

“Nita was there, the handsome Indian girl with the dark, laughing eyes and always a flashing smile. I had watched her at some of the other dances and noticed that she was a good dancer and very popular. So, as Johnny knows everyone on the island, I got him to ‘fix me up.’ She was indeed a good dancer but very independent. After every dance I had with her she would waltz off to the side lines without a word, leaving me in the middle of the floor feeling like a fish on land.”

In August 1932, the trio left the Pintail with a Grand Isle resident and drove back to Texas, limping into Fort Worth on flat tires. Fonville convinced school superintendents to let him show his edited film to school children, charging them ten cents apiece—which he split with the schools. He took along baby alligators and demonstrated alligator calls to the goggle-eyed students.

No diary for 1933 has been found, but the 1934 diary makes it clear that Fonville visited Grand Isle that summer. The Pintail diary resumes in 1934, when he returned to the island alone and bade a final farewell to his storm-damaged boat.

Alfred Danziger, a prominent New Orleans businessman, owned a camp where Fonville stayed. He also met Duyane “Buck” Norman, a student who convinced him to attend LSU in the fall. The diary ends with entries about wandering around the campus and enrolling in classes. He procured a job playing saxophone in school bands and used his photographic skills to document campus life (including several visits by Huey Long). He shot a 16mm campus newsreel that he showed to students.

While at LSU, Fonville ran into a young woman from Fort Worth, Helen Collins. In 1936, they married and dropped out of LSU. (They had three children, Bob, Meriget, and Walker.) Fonville opened a studio on Laurel Street, where he worked until his death in 1992. When he unearthed the photos of his Pintail travels, his son Bob began to make available photographs of those youthful wanderings. He also put Fonville’s diaries on computer. Thousands of negatives were deposited with Hill Memorial Library at LSU, as was the twenty-six-minute film The Cruise of the Pintail.

James and Meriget Turner were delighted with Fonville’s gift for telling a story. “I was shocked at how well he wrote,” says James. “I had no idea he was such a literate fellow at such a young age. I felt like the story was of a young man’s transition into adult life. This was a capable, smart man moving from late adolescence into adulthood. In [later life], he was trapped by the studio, by family, by the expectations of others. This book is about the time when he was free.”

Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.