Thorn L. Mayes, Sr. was born April 19, 1903, in Covington, Kentucky and raised in Springfield, Kentucky until 1915, when he moved to Coalinga, California. He attended Coalinga High School from 1919 until 1923.
In 1921 the principal of Coalinga High authorized the purchase of an amateur wireless radio station for the purpose of broadcasting results of athletic events at the school and put Mayes in charge of the purchase. This introduction to electronics was to have a lasting effect on Mayes. The equipment consisted of a 1KW spark transmitter, regenerative receiver, audion detector, and two-stage amplifier. The station reported the results of many local track meets and communicated with amateurs as far away as Alamagordo, New Mexico and Boise, Idaho. Mayes operated the amateur station 6JR of Oakland, California until the fall of 1923, when he moved to Berkeley to attend the University of California.
Mayes graduated with honors from the University of California in 1927, with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering. In July of 1927, he married Lygia Ouer of Oakland, California, and moved to Schenectady, New York to begin a long career with General Electric. Mayes completed the General Electric test course, and spent the next two and a half years working on large induction motor design. Late in 1930 he transferred to General Electric's Oakland, California plant, and acted as a motor design and application engineer for the eleven western states. This was a vital period as the western pump companies had recently developed small-diameter, multistage pumps which could be installed in drilled irrigation wells as small as eight inches in diameter. These pumps required special vertical hollow shaft induction motors for drive, and their introduction made possible the irrigation of vast agricultural areas in California, Arizona and other states.
It was also during the 1930s that Mayes met Norman Nevills, of Nevills River Expeditions fame, and became interested in compiling the first map of the Monument Valley area. Nevills flew him up in his Pyper Cub so that he could take aerial photographs of the area he wished to map.
During World War II Mayes was Engineer and Superintendent of the Oakland motor plant, and in 1949 was transferred back to Schenectady, New York as Assistant to the Manger of Engineering of General Electric. In 1950 he was transferred by General Electric to the Lynn, Massachusetts plant as Manager of Engineering of the alternating and direct current motor operation. Mayes was transferred in 1953 to Ft. Wayne, Indiana to supervise a study to select tooling and supervisory manpower, and to build and operate a new plant to manufacture single and polyphase production motors with one to five horsepower. He was also manager of the plant. Finally late in 1958 he moved to the Shelbyville, Indiana plant to become Manager of the Engineering Industrial Heating Department, which worked with large steel mill furnaces.
Mayes retired in 1963 at the age of sixty, and moved to Saratoga, California to travel and pursue hid hobbies. He died in about 1988.
(This biography was taken from one Mayes wrote himself, found in Box 1 of Accession 1189.)
This collection was donated to the University of Utah in December of 1990 by Thorn Mayes' son, Thorn Mayes Jr., of Durango, Colorado. The collection was received by Gregory C. Thompson in Durango.
The heart of the collection is the aerial photographs that the senior Mayes used in his project to create the first map of the Monument Valley area. The photographs are of the drainage of the San Juan River, and include the watershed of the Rio Grande. The photographs date 1934-1937. These photographs were arranged chronologically by set, and then consecutively by index number within each set. The sets are not complete. See the survey indexes in Box 2, oversize, for the area covered. In both boxes, aerial photography is followed by landscapes. Box 2 contains an exceptional album of hand-colored photographs of the Grand Canyon by Fred Harvey of the El Tovar Studio.
Please note that due to the fact that Fairchild Aerial Surveys, Inc. Of Los Angeles took these photographs on contract with either the U.S. Department of the Interior or the U. S. Department of Agriculture, any one of the three parties could hold copyright. Patrons are responsible for obtaining written permission from the appropriate agency before copies of these photographs can be obtained.
See also Mayes own aerial photographs in the Norman Nevills Collection, P0341, Box 9.
Collection is arranged topically.
Twenty-four hour advanced notice encouraged. Materials must be used on-site. Access to parts of this collection may be restricted under provisions of state or federal law.
The library does not claim to control copyright for all materials in the collection. An individual depicted in a reproduction has privacy rights as outlined in Title 45 CFR, part 46 (Protection of Human Subjects). For further information, please review the J. Willard Marriott Library’s
Collection Name, Collection Number, Box Number, Folder Number. Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, The University of Utah.
Gift of Thorn Mayes, Jr. in 1990.
Processed by Peter Schmid in 2004 and by Agnes Korzeniowski in 2007.
Manuscript materials were transferred to the Thorn L. Mayes papers (ACCN 1189).
Audio-visual materials were transferred to the Thorn L. Mayes audio-visual collection (A0183).
This collection forms part of the Utah River Running Archive, which is part of the S.J. Quinney Outdoor Recreation Archive