As a 12-year-old boy in 1939, Larson took his first job as a paperboy.

“I picked up a route at 12 years old,” Larson recalled. “I had the second largest route — 80 papers on the west side by the river.”

Larson, a lifelong Fort Dodge resident, held the job for two years, he said.

Fast forward almost 25 years, and his work was featured on the front pages of newspapers being delivered daily throughout The Messenger region.

-Submitted photo One of Fred Larson's favorite photos is one he took of Central Avenue in Fort Dodge.

Larson was hired by the company as a photographer in 1963. He retired in 1993.

Throughout his tenure, Larson photographed everything from sporting and political events to violent car crashes and massive fires.

“When I say I did it all,” Larson said. “That’s what I mean.”

He’s photographed eight United States presidents in Iowa, including Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush.

He photographed John F. Kennedy’s historic visit to Fort Dodge in 1960 while working at Bergeman Studio.

-Messenger photo by Chad Thompson Fred Larson, of Fort Dodge, sits with some of his favorite photos outside of Friendship Haven recently. Larson was a photographer at The Messenger for 30 years.

Larson’s passion for capturing images started at a young age.

He was 9 years old when he bought his first camera.

“I bought it for 10 cents and three box tops,” he said.

“It was a little tiny camera,” Larson added. “The film was already in it, and you could send it in and they would send it back to you with a roll of film in it.”

It was on the train tracks where he took his first photo.

“My friends and I come walking up and here comes this train near Phinney Park,” Larson said. “Here was this black smoke coming out the top, and he was blowing his whistle to get us off the tracks and that was white smoke.”

When the train produced white smoke that’s when Larson took the picture.

“I took that with my tiny little camera,” Larson said. “And when I got that picture back, I thought I was pretty darn good.”

While in junior high school, Larson was able to work under a master photographer and painter named Nels Isaacson, he said.

“He was the most interesting fella,” Larson said. “He could retouch negatives.”

“My mother got a call one afternoon and Nels was looking for someone to clean out his room after 5 p.m.,” Larson said. “I went up there and he gave me the job.”

That was 1941.

Larson would clean out garbage cans and sweep the floors for Isaacson at his studio, Baldwin Studios.

Isaacson’s studio was located on the second floor, directly across from The Messenger on Central Avenue.

Eventually, Larson worked with Isaacson in the darkroom.

“You had the image on a sheet of film, which you had to develop,” he said. “We had a recipe book that we used to mix up our chemicals.”

He remembers helping to create a color photo.

“My first color ever was in 1942, working with color in a black and white darkroom,” he said. “In the 1930s, when Kodak was first into color situations, the war was brewing over in Europe and things were tough to come by.”

“Color was kind of a secret, I guess,” Larson said. “All of the sudden, Nels asked me to come back and help him. He would shoot the film and we would dip it in red, blue, and yellow dyes. You would put in this tray and swoosh it around for a little while. I don’t remember how many minutes, and you would stick it on a board with these pieces of plastic. You would slip that onto a rig and another one on top and another on top and you would squeegee it out, and there was your color photo. You would have a positive. It was a pretty primitive way to make a color print.”

Larson learned from Isaacson for two-and-a-half years before he moved away, Larson said.

“He taught me a lot,” Larson said. “Unfortunately, he and his wife got a divorce and he left town.”

That’s when Larson went to work for another photographer named Harold Bergeman in the mid-1940s.

“Harold had a large studio,” Larson said.

At the business, Bergeman and Larson sold cameras and developed film.

Larson worked for Bergeman for 18 years.

In 1963, Larson left for The Messenger.

Larson covered thousands of assignments ranging from county fairs, community celebrations, graduations, and the arrival of new businesses.

For Messenger Sports, Larson covered football, baseball, swimming, basketball, and volleyball.

He enjoyed visiting Fort Dodge schools for assignments featuring young students.

“Working with kids, one of my favorite jobs was going into the grade schools,” he said.

Larson would ask the teacher in advance if there was a student who was feeling down about themselves.

“I usually tried to get two, a girl and a boy,” he said. “I would have them help me.”

“I would tell them I said, ‘This trips the shutter and now ask her to smile and push that down slow, real slow,'” he said.

After the photos ran in the paper, Larson would ask the teacher if it made an impact, he said.

“And the teacher said, ‘Oh they would just light up like a hundred-watt lightbulb,'” Larson said. “They couldn’t believe their picture was in the paper.”

Not every assignment was a joy, though.

The longest day of Larson’s career came on Jan. 11, 1971, when a fire claimed one life and destroyed eight businesses in downtown Fort Dodge.

The fire impacted the area where the Great Western Bank is now, he said.

“That was a hard day because of that death and because of the damage,” Larson said. “Karl King (Municipal Band) had a lot of their instruments up on the third floor and they lost everything.”

Larson worked from 3 a.m. to 6 p.m. that day.

Taking pictures down in one of Fort Dodge’s gypsum mines was another memorable assignment, Larson said.

“That was one I always wanted to do,” he said.

Larson journeyed down some 200 feet beneath the surface of a mine belonging to Martin-Marrietta Aggregates Inc.

“It’s the strangest feeling when you’re down in a mine,” Larson said. “At least it was for me. You get down there and back in there a ways and wonder how people work down in places like this when all of that earth is above you. It’s kind of surreal, kind of frightening, but yet people work down there every day.”

It was those opportunities that made the job special, he said.

“In this job you got into places other people never got into,” he said. “Things like that. Meeting every kind of person that comes in here that’s famous.”

Larson retired from The Messenger in 1993.

He lives at the River Ridge Apartments on Friendship Haven’s campus.

Larson remembers playing on the same grounds where he now lives. Only at that time, there was no Friendship Haven.

“I used to play out here at Friendship Haven,” Larson said. “Then it was a cow pasture. The guy that had the cows lived right across the highway.”

Larson’s wife of 53 years, Delores Larson, passed way in 2011.

“We were married 53 years, nine months, and five days, but I am not counting,” he said.

Larson said he enjoyed the variety that photography offered.

“For me it was the perfect job,” he said.

He took pride in his work.

“You wanted to make sure you got something that you were proud to put in the paper and were happy to do it,” he said. “There wasn’t a day that I wasn’t happy getting up at 6 a.m. and going to work. Every day was different and I was doing something I loved to do.”

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