All,
Just to fill in some of the recent back and forth about the history of Mike Stackhouse.
My Grandfather, H. Armstrong Roberts (Sr.) was born and raised in Philadelphia in the early 1880s. In the time period around and following 1910 he and his then new family spent a lot of time photographing and living on Long Beach Island, New Jersey; around Loveladies and Harvey Ceders at the Barnegat Light north end of the island. He was an established writer and photographer of outdoor activities and photo stories. Barnegat subjects included family beach stories, fishing, boating, watermen, coast guard stations and people, and Barnegat Bay duck hunting. Sometime around 1920 Mike Stackhouse became one of his most often used models in a variety of photo stories with young kids (my father, H. Armstrong Roberts, Jr., and his older brother as boys), loading and hunting from duck boats, repairing and painting water craft, etc. Fortunately in a number of these photographs a 10 ga Parker hammerless shotgun was prominently featured as a prop along with a wooden Nitro Club wooden box of 500 shells in two piece cardboard boxes, Mike is seen variously cleaning the Parker, admiring boxes of shells and navigating duck boats. Mike and several other denizens of bay were used again and again through the 1920s into the 1930s. These Barnegat Bay images were some of the first in the Stock Photography business, The Photography of H. Armstrong Roberts, founded in 1920, still in operation today, and celebrating our 100th year this year, 2019.
Now, as to why there are so many different products advertised and shown as art not just as a photographs. It was quite common to license our photographs for use as “artist’s reference”. Under such a license to use a photograph the graphic artist was permitted to modify or change an image in various ways, Add a product, change a product, or add a hat which is the case in the Ketterlinus Lithograph (incidentally, a Philadelphia company) shown above.
I am PGCA member #810 and at the beginning of my small Parker collection I was pleased to find in our files and contribute the use of Mike with a Parker for the cover of the first revised Parker Pages and for the calendar produced shortly after that.
For a look at more photographs:
http://parkerguns.org/forums/album.php?albumid=7