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Fritz A. Lentz
Photographer of Lake Tahoe
1884 - 1961
The Photographer's history is not as clear as his photographs. We do know Fritz A. Lentz first visited the high Sierra Nevada in the summer of 1923. He came with friends, as tourists from Fresno where he had a photography business. He probably moved to the north shore of Lake Tahoe in the early 1930's and built a small building in Lake Forest.
This building served as his cabin and The Lake Tahoe Photo Shop
and Curio Shop. At that time the highway looped into Lake Forest, making it a necessary part of a scenic drive that skirted the lake. The summer tourist traffic that supported the photo and curio shop was drastically reduced when the bypass was created that avoided Lake Forest. In 1937 shop owner, Fritz Lentz, then moved his operation
to the main street of King's Beach, near the corner of Bear Street,
now North Lake Boulevar d. (Highway 28).
Fritz hired a young man, Jim Mandeville, with a flat bed truck, to help him move the building to Kings Beach. Jim had access to a flat bed truck large enough to move a small building. Jim told Fritz that the
truck could not hold the entire building at once and that Fritz would have to saw his building in half. Fritz complied and the two halves were hauled one-at-a-time to the new location in Kings Beach. The dirt
road was narrow and the truck was stopped at one point by two trees that were too close to the road and were not allowing room to pass. They had to cut one of the trees down to make the passage.
The people that knew Fritz say they really did not know him well.
They have found it hard to be very specific about what kind of person he was. He is remembered for being nice and friendly but kept to himself. He lived alone while he was in Tahoe and as far as we know he never married. He was reported to have liked and often made garlic soup.
He would tease neighborhood children with offering them a bowl of
the pungent soup.
He was respected for his talents not only as a photographer but as a wood worker. He built and used an outhouse that people marveled at its construction and engineering. It was said to be quite a piece of cabinet making. In the mid 1950's it was demanded by his neighbors that Fritz give up his outhouse and convert to indoor plumbing.
He built the curio shop and cabin in Kings Beach, which included The World Famous Wishing Well. Fritz spent lots of money and many
years to collect the assortment of beautiful domestic rocks and stones that decorated the wishing well and patio area.
People were always under the impression that Fritz was from Scandinavia, probably Swedish. According to copyright papers Fritz sent to Washington D.C. for some of his postcard images, he listed his country of origin as Russia. He was probably German but because of the Nazi movement in Europe he preferred a more neutral profile.
Legend has it that Fritz froze to death one cold winter in 1961 after drinking too much red wine. Apparently he did not stoke up the fire before he passed out and got too cold.
He died without a family or a will; the State of California took his estate and auctioned his real estate and the contents of his building. Among his estate contents were many tens of thousands of negatives, many of them glass-plate negatives. A heaping truck load was hauled to the dump. The men hired to haul it away kept out a big box of negatives and those are the surveying negatives that make up this exclusive collection.
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