By Catherine Darragh
Ned Paynter was best known to Friends of San Diego Architecture as a professor of history at San Diego State University. He was born in Victoria, B.C., Canada, and moved to San Diego as a teen-ager with his family. He received a B.A. and M.A. from then San Diego State College, and a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley. During his varied career as an academic, Dr. Paynter taught on U.S. Navy ships, at the University of East Anglia in England, the University of Missouri, St. Louis, and the Goethe Institute of Anglo and American Studies in Frankfurt, in what was then West Germany, as well as at San Diego State.
Over the years, Dr. Paynter acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of architecture, jazz, and baseball. He became a gifted artist and photographer. He also had a longstanding involvement with public radio. He was the News Director for KPFA in Berkeley. At KWMU in St. Louis, he reviewed movies and was a disc jockey on his own jazz show.
In 1982, Dr. Paynter began teaching as an adjunct instructor at San Diego Mesa College. He also provided commentaries on many subjects for KPBS, the public radio station broadcasting from SDSU. Harriet Gill, the founder of Friends of San Diego Architecture, was also a commentator at KPBS during the eighties and invited her new friend Ned to speak to FSDA. He gave his first lecture in 1990 on London’s Future: In the battle of the styles, whose “vision of Britain” will prevail? Another lecture followed in 1992: Architectural Decoration in an Age of Computerized Manufacture. As a personal note, quite honestly, Ned intimidated me a little back then. He had such a booming voice (resonant and powerful) and was such a presence in a room. He was probably one of the few speakers who could have broken Harriet’s steadfast rule about using a microphone.
In 1995 Ned’s life took an unexpected turn which curtailed his travels. He was diagnosed with spinal cancer and was confined to a wheelchair. But a trip to London to prepare a third lecture for Friends of San Diego Architecture was on his “bucket list” as he approached his seventieth birthday. After a frank and practical discussion with Harriet Gill about making the trip alone, Ned’s sister, Diane Jaynes, asked his friend John Polhamus to go along as a companion. The trip became a reality, and in November 2006 Ned gave his final lecture to FSDA, London After the Millennium. Shortly after, Ned passed away. One of my biggest regrets is not getting to know him better.
Postscript: In 2008 I had a call from Ned’s sister. She asked if FSDA would like Ned’s slide collection. I couldn’t imagine what we would do with it at the time, but when I picked up the thirty tins, containing almost 10,000 slides, I knew they were a priceless gift to Friends. The Ned Paynter Collection became the impetus for our online image library. Once work on that first online collection started, as an effort to preserve a valuable part of Ned’s life’s work, I discovered that I loved working on the slides. They gave me great joy and many hours of pleasure researching some of the images. It took more than three years to complete, but it was a great education for me. I now recognize images which I would never have recognized in a million years if I hadn’t worked on his slides. Since that time, Ned’s images of architecture, art, world history, culture, and special niches like baseball, Googies, and historic theaters, have been shared with the public and shown on many other websites. They have appeared in books and in many publications, from Phaidon Press, Oxford University Press, the New York Times, and Architectural Design. The images often pop up on the Google image search site. Writers, architects, and museum directors have asked permission to use specific images. What a wonderful way for Ned to be remembered!