This collection follows Joseph Mountain's aviation career as a U.S. Air Service pilot, aerial surveyor, photographer, and writer. It includes photographic negatives and prints, diaries and flight log books, reports, and maps. Mountain's photographs from his service in Saudi Arabia, taken not long before the great oil discoveries at Dammam in 1938, capture the desert kingdom at the very edge of the tremendous changes that the oil economy brought to the Gulf. Mountain also extensively photographed members of the California-Arabian Standard Oil Company (CASOC) team at work and interacting with their Saudi workers and acquaintances. Help us transcribe his documents and images which are a fascinating record of traditional Saudi Arabian life, crafts, and architecture. Highlights include portraits of dancers at Eid al-Fitr celebrations, market scenes in Hufuf and the Old Town of Al Jubail, camel caravans, Saudi hunters with their hawks, and pearl fishermen and their dhows.
Born in Cherryvale, Kansas, Mountain joined the U.S. Army Air Service in 1919. After leaving the Air Service, Mountain took up photography and was employed in 1928 by the Continental Air Map Company to map from the air the state of California. In 1934-1935, he served on an expedition to Saudi Arabia for the California-Arabian Standard Oil Company (CASOC; in 1944 renamed the Arabian American Oil Company or Aramco, now Saudi Aramco). Mountain logged over 221 hours of reconnaissance and mapping flights for CASOC during this expedition. In 1936-1937, Mountain contracted with Saudi Arabia to make an aerial survey of the Hejaz region. For ten years after that, Mountain was a pilot for Trans World Airlines. During World War II, he returned to active duty with the U.S. Army Air Forces as a training officer in the Air Transport Command. He was awarded the Bronze Star while serving in the China-Burma-India Theater and supervising supply missions over "The Hump" -- the dangerous air route over the Himalaya Range. In 1945 he was promoted to full Colonel and appointed executive officer of the Committee for Air Navigation and Traffic Control. Following his retirement from military service, Mountain entered the computer industry in 1947 with International Telephone and Telegraph. Later, he founded Mountain Systems, a digital computer manufacturing company, and Mountain Datasystem, a data processing firm. During the Korean War, he served as an Air Force liaison officer with the Bell Telephone Laboratories. After the war, he returned to civilian life and continued to work in the computer industry. Joseph Mountain died on November 25, 1970 at the age of 68.