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FACES OF DESPAIR, FACES OF HOPE: AFRICAN -AMERICANS IN LAKELAND IN THE 1930'S FROM THE DAN SANBORN PHOTO COLLECTION BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Dan Sanborn was born in Flushing, New York on January 15, 1916. He moved with his family to Miami, Florida in 1924 and then to Lakeland two years later. With brief interruptions, Lakeland was his home from that point forward. Sanborn's career in journalism began during his junior year at Lakeland High School when one of his teachers suggested that he write about high school events and submit the pieces to The Lakeland Evening Ledger and Star Telegram. The paper began to publish his articles and he quickly became a regular in the paper's newsroom. He also continued to develop another interest he had begun in high school, photography. After he graduated from high school in 1934, Sanborn was offered a job at the newspaper at the princely sum of $3 a week. It was the height of the Depression and jobs were scarce, so he accepted. He became one of the newspaper's few reporters and its only photographer and covered everything from city commission meetings, to a visit to Lakeland by Henry Ford, to the Detroit Tigers spring training camp. The newspaper provided him with a rudimentary dark room to develop his own photographs. In order to work in the unventilated dark room at the height of a central Florida summer, Sanborn invented his own air conditioner, a 50 pound block of ice set in front of a fan. Sanborn left The Ledger in 1941 to work as a photographer and public relations official at the recently established Lodwick School of Aeronautics in Lakeland. He took photographs and produced brochures and other public relations materials for the school, which trained pilots for service in the Army Air Force. He enlisted in the Navy in early 1942, serving in Naval Intelligence until his discharge in 1946. Upon his return to Lakeland after the war, Sanborn began a number of businesses including Sanborn Photo Service, Sanborn Advertising Agency, and Sanborn Productions, a motion picture production company. He took photographs and produced promotional films for number of commercial clients including the city of Lakeland, the Chamber of Commerce, Cypress Gardens, and the manufacturer of Catalina swimsuits. In 1960, Sanborn accepted the position of news director of radio station WONN in Lakeland. He remained there until his retirement in 1982. Even while working at WONN Sanborn continued to take photographs. In a 1992 newspaper interview, he estimated that he had taken more than 100,000 photographs in his long career. He began donating negatives of some of those estimated 100,000 photographs to the Special Collections unit of the Lakeland Public Library in 1990, when the library used some of his photographs in an exhibit commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Lodwick School of Aeronautics. All told, Sanborn donated more than 6,000 negatives to the Special Collections unit, most dating from the late 1930's to the early 1950's. Former Special Collections Librarian Hal Hubener obtained a grant to have prints (P720) made from approximately 800 of the negatives. The prints represent the rich heritage of the city and depict a Lakeland from more than sixty years ago. Dan Sanborn's skill with a camera, his appreciation for Lakeland's history, and his generous spirit have combined to give student's of Lakeland's history a resource beyond measure. Dan Sanborn died in his beloved Lakeland on April 4, 2001. He was 85. |
