Not entirely satisfied, he went to work for L. R. Thayer, an early El Paso photographer, and there found his place in the business world. Mastering the art of taking tintype pictures, the fourteen year old youth opened a gallery of his own on July 4, 1869. He later bought out Mr. Thayer and expanded his operations. On December 26, 1876, Miss Emma Laura Arnold became his wife; she became an adept photographer in her own right and handled the business whenever her husband was busy in his dark room or at his Minonk studio. Mr. Smith often confessed that he owed his success largely to his talented wife. Two sons were born to them, Roy A. who died when young, and Max, a lifetime resident of El Paso who is presently an excellent violinist and an assistant cashier in the El Paso National Bank. Emma L. Arnold was the daughter of Isaac M. and Sarah V. Arnold, early Gabetown residents; the latter was a talented artist and painted the picture of Andrew Carnegie which today hangs in the El Paso Public Library.

Much of El Paso's history was coincident with the life of Levi Smith, and he had much of it on photographic plates. The committee preparing this book was fortunate in finding many of these plates of earlier El Paso, and to a great extent, the pictures appearing in this book are Levi F. Smith's. George R. Curtiss wrote of him: "He snapped the shutter of his camera at the new baby, and later when the girl graduated from school, then in her bridal gown, later with a baby in her own arms, then as a member of the family group during reunions, and sometimes on the memorial wreath and flowers when she was laid to her last sleep."

Possessing an inventive mind, Levi Smith obtained two patents in 1907; one was on a trimming machine and another on a method of mounting plates. He had a desire to keep pace with progress, and devoted several months at the Chicago Fine Arts Studio in studying the art of negative retouching. He found increasing pleasure in the history of photography; tintypes, wet plates, dry plates, graflex, panoramic and movie cameras had all been studied and used by Levi F. Smith. Any electrical gadget fascinated Mr. Smith, and it seemed to him that the radio was the greatest of all electrical phenomena. How he would have enjoyed television!

Brigadier General Ira D. Snyder was born February 11, 1904 on a farm six miles west of El Paso to David M. and Caroline Snyder, both deceased. He obtained his elementary school education at the Olive Branch school east of Secor on Route 24. He attended the two-year high school at Secor, thereafter attending the El Paso Township High School and catching on its baseball team prior to his graduation in 1921. The next fall he attended the School of Engineering in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Following that he worked for three years for Western Electric and the Commonwealth Edison Companies as an electrical draftsman.

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