Sawyer's, Inc. was an American manufacturer and retailer of slide projectors, scenic slides, View-Master reels and viewers, postcards, and related products, based in Portland, Oregon. Founded in 1914 as a photo-finishing company, Sawyer's began producing and selling View-Masters in 1939, and that soon became its primary product. It later diversified into other photographic products, mostly related to film transparencies, and established manufacturing plants in Europe, Japan and India. By the early 1960s, Sawyer's was the nation's second-largest manufacturer of slide projectors, and by 1965 slide projectors had surpassed View-Master reels and equipment as a percentage of the company's annual sales. In 1951, the company moved from Portland proper to the unincorporated Progress area in Portland's southwestern suburbs. In 1966, Sawyer's was acquired by New York-based General Aniline & Film (GAF), and its product lines and facilities were taken over by GAF. It was a subsidiary company of GAF until 1968, when it became simply a division of that company, renamed the GAF Consumer Photo Division. For several years thereafter, GAF used "Sawyer's" as a brand name for its slide projectors.
Early years
Sawyer's was founded in Portland, Oregon, in 1914 by Carleton Sawyer and A. R. Specht as a photo-finishing service. Specht was a Portland executive in the San Francisco-based Owl Drug Company chain. Owl Drug's Portland store was the chain's third-busiest, and Specht hoped to capitalize on the public's growing use of cameras by making Owl Drug a convenient source of photo-finishing services for Portlanders. In mid-1919, Edwin E. Mayer, a camera enthusiast who had just graduated from the North Pacific College of Pharmacy (in Portland), bought out Carleton Sawyer's stake in the company bearing his name. Later the same year, Mayer and three relatives acquired the remaining stake from A. R. Specht. According to a 1946 article in The Oregonian, "For 20 years Mayer retained membership in the pharmaceutical ranks, but never practiced his profession," working instead on building up the photofinishing business of Sawyer's. In 1924, the company was occupying a , two-story building on SW 20th Avenue, next to Multnomah Field in central Portland. By that time, the company had begun producing photographic postcards and souvenir photo sets. As business grew, the company purchased an adjacent two-story building on SW Ella Street (now 20th Place) for expansion.
In 1926, Harold J. Graves joined the company. He had served a long stint as a U.S. Army photographer and then operated photo shops in Salem and Eugene, Oregon, before buying a stake in Sawyer's. Graves handled marketing for the company's products while Mayer ran the business. Later, photographic greeting cards marketed to major department stores were added to the Sawyer's product line. Sawyer's was the nation's largest producer of scenic postcards in the 1920s. Mayer remained the company's general manager for more than three decades, until his death in 1956 from a heart attack.
View-Master introduction
The company took the first steps towards developing the View-Master stereoscope after a chance meeting, at the Oregon Caves in 1938, between Graves and William Gruber, an organ maker of German origin trained by Welte & Sons and an avid photographer, living in Portland. The View-Master used disk-shaped "reels" which are thin cardboard disks containing seven stereoscopic 3-D pairs of small color photographs on film, and its individual eyepieces immersed the viewer into the scene more fully than previous stereoscopes. Mayer and Gruber had both developed devices for viewing stereo images, but Gruber had developed the idea of mounting tiny pieces of Kodachrome color transparency film into reels made from heavy paper stock, for viewing in a stereo slide viewer designed for the reels. Gruber partnered with the owners of Sawyer's to develop the invention.