James H. Carmel

James H. Carmel January 11, 1919 - July 30, 2016 Rancho Santa Fe James Henry Carmel, 97, died peacefully Saturday, July 30, 2016, at his home in Rancho Santa Fe, CA. He was predeceased by his wife of 58 years, Patricia S. Carmel, and is survived by three children, two step-daughters, 13 grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren. He was born on January 11, 1919, in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of New York City. Until he was six he lived with his parents and elder sister in the Belvedere, an elegant six-story Beaux Arts apartment house on the corner of West 150th Street and Edgecombe Avenue, high above the Harlem River. In 1925 his father, an accountant and manager of M. Cohen & Brothers, a New York fur manufacturing company, moved the family 15 miles north to the suburb of New Rochelle, in Westchester County, New York. By his mid-teens, he had developed into a fine artist, talented enough to qualify for a coveted spot in the free art schools of the National Academy of Design, founded in New York City in 1826 and the foremost art foundation in the country. Instead of returning to New Rochelle High in the fall of 1935 he began commuting to the academy at Amsterdam and 109th Street where he thrived, enjoying drawing from casts of sculpture and from life, the camaraderie among fellow artists, and in the summer of 1936, a rare summer fellowship at Laurelton Hall, Louis C. Tiffany's 600-acre estate at Oyster Bay, Long Island.In the spring of his second year he left the academy to take a position as a preparator of dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History's new Hall of North American Mammals. He spent three years at the museum, working with fellow diorama artists to create the highly detailed three-dimensional foregrounds for the Alaskan moose, grizzly bear, mountain lion, and Colobus Monkey, among other exhibits. In late 1939 he left the museum to become an assistant preparator or "leaf twiddler" at The Cranbrook Institute of Science, a fine natural history museum founded in 1927 by Ellen Scripps and George Booth as part of their Cranbrook educational community. Bundled up in his father's raccoon coat, he drove to Detroit in a 1935 Ford convertible (sans heater) that he had reluctantly won from a friend in a game of craps. Arriving during Christmas week with a car helped make instant friends with the artists and instructors in residence at the Cranbrook Academy of Art two men and 16 women and within a few weeks he had moved out of a boarding house and was sharing a suite in the men's academy with Harry Bertoia, a sculptor and furniture designer. His arrival coincided with what would come to be known as Cranbrook's golden age and the new social life included frequent dinner parties at the home of Eliel and Loja Saarinen with their son Eero and his wife, Lilian. He became part of the crowd that included Swedish sculptor Carl Milles, architect Kevin Roche, furniture designers Charles and Catherine Eames, ceramicist Maija Grotell, sculptor Marshall Fredericks, weaver Marianne Strengell, and painters Clifford West and Zoltan Sepeshy, among others.The good times at Cranbrook ended with America's entry into World War II and he enlisted in May 1942 at Detroit and was accepted as a cadet in the Army Air Corps. After two years of basic, primary, and advanced training as a heavy bomber pilot, in the spring of 1944 Lt. Carmel took command a B-24 Liberator in Topeka, Kansas, and flew with his crew to San Pancrazio, Italy, via Brazil and Morocco. They flew 18 European bombing missions in multiple, battle-weary Liberators before being shot down over Austria on May 29, 1944. He and his flight engineer were the only two out of ten crewmembers to survive.From June 1944 to January 1945 Lt. Carmel was held as a prisoner of war at Stalag Luft III in Sagan, Germany (now Poland), the P.O.W. camp made famous by the Great Escape of March 1944. With the approach of the Russian Army in January 1945, he and 11,000 fellow American and Allied officers (along with the camp guards and some 20,000 civilians) were force-marched over four days and nights in blizzard conditions to a railroad siding at Spremberg where they were jammed into boxcars and transported to Moosburg, an overcrowded P.O.W. camp near Munich.After liberation by Gen. George S. Patton's Third Army, Lt. Carmel and a friend walked out of the open camp gates on April 29, 1945, and were picked up by two US Army officers from an advanced reconnaissance team. The following day he hitched a ride on a C-47 transport plane to Paris in time for VE Day and spent the next month there and in Italy before returning the United States in June. Like so many of his generation, he never spoke about his war experiences until his flight engineer tracked him down 50 years later.Following the war he earned an M.A. in Fine Arts from the University of Nebraska, spent two years in London on a Fulbright scholarship, and returned to Cranbrook where he met and married Patricia in 1954 and became step-father to three daughters from her previous marriage Patricia Joy Darmon of Geneva, Switzerland, Victoria Joy Emmons of Cumberland, ME, and the late Josephine Joy MacLean of Harbor Springs, MI. The Carmels had three children together Christopher Carmel now of Sheldon, SC, Jeffrey Carmel of Rancho Santa Fe, CA; and Jennifer Carmel of Olivenhain, CA. In subsequent years, his work as an artist, photographer, filmmaker, and World's Fair and museum exhibit designer took the family from Brussels to Nassau, New York, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Los Angeles among other cities. He was the author of "Exhibition Techniques: Traveling and Temporary" (1962) as well as the inventor of Superscan, a 35mm, 360-degree motion picture camera. His last major museum work was for the George C. Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, a job that brought the Carmels from Detroit to Rancho Santa Fe in 1973.Known lifelong for his marvelous sense of humor, dry wit, and amusing pranks, he was also an avid sailor, freshwater fly fisherman, weekend golfer, and into his mid-nineties could daily be seen briskly walking the riding trails of Rancho Santa Fe.A private memorial service will be held at a later time. Please sign the guest book online at legacy.com/obituaries/ ranchosantafereview .