Coy Watson Jr. (1912-2009) Coy Jr. appeared in his first movie the Price of Silence (1913), at the age of nine months for Selig Studios. Coy dedication to the Keystone Comedies in his teens dubbed him the Keystone Kid. Coy acted with all the well-known Sennett Studio stars of the era such as, Gloria Swanson and Mabel Norman, the Keystone Cops, and Fatty Arbuckle.
Photography was always a large part of Coy’s life. At the age of four, Coy remembers himself standing on a stool, watching his grandfather, James developing film in their pantry and how magical it seemed to him. When Coy’s uncle George Watson discovered that young Coy Jr. was interested in photography, he gave him a job sweeping the floors at Pacific + Atlantic Photos, and with it, an opportunity to learn photography. Coy’s first news picture was published when he was 16, and soon after he was hired as a photographer at Pacific+Atlantic.
In the following years, he worked at the newspapers of the day including, the Post Record, the Los Angeles Herald, the Los Angeles Times, while returning back to Pacific+Atlantic (ACME). Coy covered some major news stories of the 1930’s including Thelma Todd’s mysterious death, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s visit to Los Angeles in 1932, and the 1932 Olympics. During this time he invented a light beam focuser that was the first application of a battery mounted on a camera to assist in focusing.
Coy Jr. headed a Coast Guard photography unit during WWII, and started his own commercial photo business after the war where he began to shoot 16mm movies for the fledgling television industry – claiming to have shot the first television news footage of Madame Chang Hi Check visiting Los Angeles in 1945, and the first L.A. based television commercial of a local auto repair shop that would change your car’s engine in one hour. Coy’s Hollywood Reel (1949) was the first made for television syndicated episodes to air which featured the Hollywood stars of the era. Coy continued in television news at KTLA, CBS, ABC, and KCRA Sacramento.