The Birmingham age-herald., 1917-04-05
MEN, WOMEN
 AND THINGS
Have you ever been to Alaska |?

Have you ever been to Alaska? 1
 If not, and you cannot go in person, you have a chance to make trip through the aid of motion pictures, and at the same time have the wonderful scenes ex- plained by one of the great Arctic travellers.
 | A prominent clubwoman called me over the phone yesterday and said: MT. Barnett, if you haven't been to the Jeff ferson to see the pictures showing the far north be sure and go for l made 8 trip to Alaska last summer, and they are splendid"
 i I'm sorry haven't yet found time to see them alL but those I have seen are truly worth while, and feel sure if the people of Birmingham realized just what is being shown they would flock to the Jefferson.
 l have been meeting lot of interesting people recently, but none more so than Dr. John w. Ruskin, whose wanderings up and down the earth put him high up as a globe trotter.
 1 Yes, he is related to the great John Ruskin, the man whose works still live, and will live as long as men and women love art and care to read masterpieces ] in prose-
 Ruskin was one of the truly great men | of the past century. The man who though an aesthete. yet had a heart that beat in sympathy with mankind felt it privilege to talk with one who was his blood kin.
 1 His nephew, named after him, was born in London, but came to America at the age of one. He entered the public schools and finished the grammar grade at F.
 
 1 He was then taken out of school by his I father, who was a great traveller, and was carried to East Africa, where together they spent six months in the jungles hunt ing and photographing lions. Back to London for a bit and then they sailed for New Zealand. spending 62 days at sea in an old clipper. They land- ed at Invercargill, where his fathers brother lived. Here they spent a year.
 
 The wanderlust struck then and they 1 lit out for San Francisco. Here young John took the four-year High school course in three years and was sent to Christ college. Cambridge, where he took his degree of M. D. It was while a Cambridge scholar that he spent his week-ends with his famous 1 uncle who lived at Highgate, London, in modest and unpretentious way so far as surrounding himself with works of art was concerned.
  Dr. Ruskin says his uncle was fond of animals, loving dogs, cats and horses. He had lovely garden, with flowers and fruits asked him if he had any special remembrance of his distinguished rela- tive Laughingly he replied: Sure he l, licked me once for eating a bunch of his prize grapes" Just think of John Ruskin licking lad. It seems apocryphal, but 1 it is true.
 After graduation he and his father went l to Buenos Aires and took in the great wheat fields, travelling and taking pictures back up to Panama
  He was bitten by the frost of the Arc tic first in 1907, when he went with Harry Whitney on the Neptune as the photogra- pher. Here he spent his first night in the Artic. It lasted five months.
 *-*
 On later voyage with Whitney and Knowton in the Neptune he spent a year. Just think of it. All the pictures on this trip were failures, as he had not learned how to photograph in the northern lights The negatives when developed were streaked with white and looked as if they had been sprinl1led with flour
 His third trip to the frozen north was made in 1916, with pr. Frank F. Thomp- son of Chicago and pr. Edwin Brook of New York. They sailed from Seattle in the King and Wings" which was origi- nally built for John R. Bradley, the multi millionaire hunter of big game, who used it to hunt polar bear. The expedition went out to search for pr. Tanquay, but while he was never found they rescued five white men, one Eskimo, his wife and two children, one a babe, and turned them over to Uncle Sam in the middle of the Pacific ocean. They were survivors of the Steffansson party
 It was on his last trip that he got his great pictures He carried three moving picture cameras, and well it was, for a | small boat in which he was seated was attacked by walrusses and two of the machines were lost. Fortunately, the films were saved.
 l He says his father was one of the first | to buy a Pathe outfit It weighed 42 pounds. The ones he carried into the Arc- tic were made of aluminium and weighed less than dozen pounds each. | forgot to tell about his trips into In- dia, and how he was turned back by the British government and refused entrance into Thibet. Of his visit to Borneo. of his days in the teak forests. with the ele- plants. of his being the guest of the Sul- tan of Sulu and photographing the one wife that the United States permitted him /, to retain out of an assortment of 21. These and other things must leave out.