Alseth, Fredric Orval

Fredric Orval Alseth (February 26, 1924 - November 29, 2006), also known as Fritz Alseth, was an illustrator and missionary who traveled widely throughout the American West and Mexico. Born in Billings, Montana, Alseth moved to Wisconsin with his family as a child before attending college and majoring in art, though he served as an engineer in World War II. After the war, Alseth moved to California, where he would spend most of the rest of his life. He was a commercial artist in the San Francisco Bay Area for roughly twenty years and produced many works relating to different localities in California, including promotional maps. In the late 1960s, he switched primarily to illustrating children's books, and in the mid-late 1970s, he focused on missionary work in Australia, Hawaii, and Latin America. He moved to the Northeastern U.S. and then Lake Chapala, Mexico, in the 1980s, but at some point returned to California, where he died in 2006.