Paul Harry Stone was born May 12, 1902 in Syracuse, New York. His father was Harvey D. Stone, a dry goods salesman born in Syracuse in 1877. His mother, Mabel E. Hovey, was born in Syracuse in 1879. He was the oldest of three children. His younger brother Walter was born in 1907 and his sister Mabel was born in 1909. The family lived at 114 May Avenue.
During the Great War he was still a student at Syracuse High School, so he did not serve in WWI. In 1921 he graduated high school and began to attend Syracuse University. The future illustrators Harry Anderson and Tom Lovell also attended Syracuse University at this period, so it is likely they knew each other and had the same art teachers. He graduated in 1925 and moved to New York City, where he probably continued to study art in night classes at the National Academy, The Grand Central School, or the Art Students League.
On March 1, 1926 he married Gertrude Frances Drogan, who was born in South Dakota in 1904. They moved to 746 Lexington Avenue, on East 59th Street, where the monthly rent was $50. Frances was a medical stenographer at Bellevue Sanitarium. After a few years their marriage ended in divorce. They had no children.
He worked at the Thayer & Barreaux advertising agency, which was co-owned by the artists Raymond Thayer and Adolphe Barreaux. By 1935 Barreaux had started his own art company, Majestic Studio, which was contracted to produce most of the interior story illustrations for Harry Donenfeld's pulp magazines, such as Spicy Adventure, Spicy Detective, Fighting Western, Hollywood Detective, Private Detective, Spicy Mystery, and Spicy Western.
Majestic Studio also sold his illustrations to other pulp magazines, such as All Star Adventure, Argosy, Clues Detective, and Popular Western. His illustrations were often left unsigned, but a few were signed "PHS" and "Paul H. H. Stone." The second "H" stands for his mother's maiden name, "Hovey." He also used a pseudonym "Bert Hove" which is derived from his maternal grandfather George Bert Hovey.
Some of the other artists who worked at Majestic Studio were Max Plaisted, Jay McArdle, Henry Kiefer, Henry Kiemle, and Raymond Burley.
On July 9, 1940 he married his second wife, Marion Lawyer of Connecticut. They had moved to 30 Odell Avenue in Yonkers, NY, which is north of the Bronx in Westchester County. They had one son.
On July 10, 1942 he was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Corps. During the enlistment process he was recorded to be five-foot-ten and to weigh 140 lbs. He served in the Pacific theater of operations.
After WWII he returned to Yonkers and commuted to NYC to illustrate medical books and technical manuals for McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, such as Kinesiology in Nursing, published in 1952. He illustrated paperback books, romance novels, and he also experimented with 3-D stereoscopic illustration.
He was a Yonkers community activist with concerns about responsible development and historic preservation. He co-founded the Northwest Civic Association of Yonkers and was elected President in 1965. He remained an outspoken advocate of Yonkers community for the rest of his life.
He retired from illustration in 1969.
He was a parishioner of the St. Matthew's Roman Catholic Church in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY.
Paul H. Stone died after a brief illness the age of eighty-four at St. John's Riverside Hospital in Yonkers on June 17, 1986.
© David Saunders 2009 |
