Paul Anthony Schmidt was born in 1911 in Martins Ferry, Ohio. His father died when Paul was 2 or 3. His mother moved from Ohio, remarried, and continued to California. His stepfather made a scanty living fishing along the Sacramento Delta. The family lived on a houseboat and Paul could get to school only by rowing across the river. Due to poverty, he left school and home when he was 14 or 15 years old. Fortunately, he had a skill; knowledge of Morse Code, taught him by an old man on the river. The teenager, now out on his own, found work as a maritime radio operator, first on fishing boats in the Gulf of California and, later, on freighters or passenger ships to South America, Australia, Canada and to Alaska. In the late 1930s he worked on the SS North Sea, registered in Juneau, which regularly travelled the Inside Passage. Schmidt was one of three radio operators aboard. In 1938 and 1939 he made the images now being donated to the Alaska State Library. His camera was a Leica, and in his cabin, he developed film and slides by sandwiching images between glass squares the same size as commercial 35mm slides. He was sometimes helped by fellow radio operator Jim Hartley (whose image is in the collection.) By late 1939, he was married and had a child on the way, so he gave up his life at sea. He joined the CAA (Civil Aeronautics Administration, now FAA.); his work was the maintenance of aviation navigation systems, e.g. radio beacon networks, and served in airports all over the West. His last post was in the Santa Barbara, CA airport. In Santa Barbara, he enrolled in Adult Night School and at last received his high school diploma, 40+ years after dropping out of school. He died suddenly in 1968 of heart failure, survived by wife Vona and daughter Sasha.