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For nearly 35 years, Du Pae, an industrial engineer by trade, crisscrossed the country cajoling archivists and private collectors to let him copy their photos, eventually donating the $500,000 collection to the Winona County Historical Society.
Slowed in recent years by health problems, Du Pae died Sunday at his La Crosse, Wis., home.
He was 83.
A La Crosse native, Du Pae dropped out of school to join the Navy at age 17. He returned to finish his senior year at Logan High School in 1946. He later studied at Western Wisconsin Technical College before landing a job with Northern Engraving.
His passion for collecting developed early. As a teenager he focused on pictures of airplanes.
In the early 1970s, Du Pae went to the Area Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse’s Murphy Library, offering to volunteer. His doctor had recommended he find a hobby to relieve stress.
Librarian Ed Hill asked him to help the library build a collection of local firefighter photos. After a year or so, Du Pae had found more than Hill imagined existed.
Du Pae asked for a new challenge, so Hill suggested he focus on riverboats, as La Crosse had been a regional shipping hub in the 19th century.
“When he gets into something, he goes into it all the way,” Kathleen Du Pae told the Tribune in 1975, when her husband had collected about 3,000 photos. “This is just his latest madness. Next year it might be something different.”
It wasn’t.
Hill estimated there might be 8,000 to 10,000 photos in existence. Du Pae found more than 50,000.
Everywhere he went, Du Pae convinced those with river-related photos to let him make copies — one for the Murphy collection and one for himself.
He never flew, always driving his station wagon — often with one or more of his five kids in tow.
Du Pae had a special knack for getting often reticent collectors to share their photos, Hill said.
“He had an ability to get people to open up to him,” said his daughter Michelle Claypool. “They just fell in love with him.”
At home, Du Pae spent hours in his garage developing prints and sorting them into 11 filing cabinets that eventually filled one of his kid’s bedrooms.
“You’d try to get out the door before he got up on Saturday,” Claypool said. “Otherwise he’d recruit you to help with the collection.”
In 2007, Du Pae donated his set of photos to the historical society because the group’s former director, the late Dr. Louis Younger, and two area riverboat captains had helped him build it.
He collected interesting friends, too, including riverboat captains and musicians like folk guitarist Eddie Allen and the late John Hartford.
“He got very well connected with that river community,” Hill said. “He really did get himself plugged into that. And he loved it. He loved it.”
