Fond Remembrance of the Family’s Kodak Connection

All the adults in the family were beheaded. The kids were spared, but I always figured it was only because we were short.

That was what saved us. Being short. I can still hear my father saying, “Marie, don’t chop our heads off again, please.”

“I never chop heads off. This camera is foolproof.”

It was almost a ritual. The old Kodak was a member of the family. Oh, sure, the sun had to be shining and the pictures were black and white, but it was the price you paid. And my mother was close to right. The camera was almost foolproof. What you shot was what you got.

Whenever we all went on a trip, that camera went with us and, from time to time, we would all be called on to pile out of the car and stand in front of some natural wonder to be photographed.

Red Rocks National Park, Grand Lake, the snowcapped Rockies. My mother would line us up in front of whatever scenic wonder it was, then take a picture.

Going to Pot, Photographically

With the straight scenery shots she was fine, but the moment the family was involved--uncles, aunts or even if it was just the four of us--things just kind of went to pot photographically.

You could never see the scenery we’d stopped for. The picture was just a bunch of people--smiling, squinting or making faces.

Mom would hold the camera at waist level, look down into the little triangular view-finder and say: “You just smile when I say smile and I’ll take the picture.”

My father would shrug, jamb his hands into his back pockets, grind his teeth down into his cigar, turn up the corners of his mouth and wait.

“Hermeline, move in closer to your brother.”

“Do I have to?”

“Smile, everybody.”

Everybody would smile. I’d make a face. There would be a light click, and the picture was taken. Sometimes with the heads and sometimes not.

Something of Quality

That particular camera, a Kodak Autographic, was one of the few things of quality my mother was able to hang onto through the Depression.

When the market crashed in 1929 my father’s wholesale plumbing business in Denver went under and just about everything else the family owned went with it.

But mother’s camera stayed.

Once a year we’d load up the old Essex for a few days of camping in the mountains. We’d go up to a spot on the South Fork of the Colorado River, about 12 miles from Grand Lake.

Preparing for those trips, my mother occasionally would forget a few things. Salt or matches or the frying pan. Once she even forgot her purse. But she never forgot the Kodak.

Then, after a day’s fishing, she would line us up, make us hold up our catch, and say: “Smile.” Everybody would, except my sister and the fish.

“One, two, three,” my mother would say. The soft click would follow and off would come the top of my father’s head, but the rest of him, along with my sister and me and the fish, were on film for posterity.

It was after one of those trips that I learned that cameras do lie. Trout invariably photograph small. The pictures that came back from the drugstore never showed them as large as when I’d had to fight them out of the river.

I thought for a time that my sister, photographing as “cute,” was part of the lying camera business. On later reflection, though, I had to admit that the camera was telling the truth. Hermeline was cute.

A Fresh Start

When we went to California, to try for a fresh start, we took pictures of the Indians sitting along Route 66 selling pottery or jewelry or rugs. Or swapping for whatever foodstuffs the travelers might have in their cars.

Though they seemed to hate it, more than once the Indians allowed my mother to photograph my sister and me with them. She never realized that in about half the pictures, if she wasn’t cutting their heads completely off, she was giving them a pretty good scalping.

Years later, long after my father died and my sister and I had families of our own, I was visiting my mother. Browsing through her albums, I saw the family pictures were there along with shots of all the places we’d been and the wonders we’d seen. Images of great moments, trapped and mounted for eternity.

Hidden in the Dresser

I remember, too, seeing the Kodak in one of my mother’s dresser drawers, among the sachets and clothing.

The bellows leaked light and there were a few other things wrong with it, but she said she could never part with it, that it had recorded too much of our lives and traveled too far with us to be thrown aside. She said she would get it fixed one day. She never did.

A few blocks south of the Russell Hotel, in London, is Walter’s World Camera Shop. My wife and I had walked down from the hotel to see about a new camera to replace my old Minolta XG-1. The display in the shop window was made up of photographic equipment popular in the 1920s and ‘30s.

In the center was a Kodak Autographic.

Walter took it out of the display and let me look at it. It was the same model, even to the little flip-open door in the back.

“So you think she never really knew how to work it right, eh?” he asked.

“Well, she did well enough on scenery, but let people move into the frame. . . . “

“And off with their heads, eh? My mum did the same thing,” he said, “and she was almost a professional.

“You see, subconscious or otherwise, they took pictures of their children. Usually, it didn’t much matter who else was in the shot. They took pictures of what was important to them, your mum and mine. And the pictures of the kids were great. Centered, everything. If that doesn’t say something about love, I don’t know what does.”

While I rethought a lot of old memories, Walter checked out my Minolta and pronounced it fit “for another hundred thousand miles.” I was kind of glad; I was beginning to feel a little disloyal about replacing it.

“She’s a little old, but there’s nothing wrong with the old girl some new glasses wouldn’t fix, eh?”

He sold me the “new glasses,” a handful of color filters and a new wide-angle lens. And he did one other thing. He promised never to sell that old Kodak Autographic without letting me bid on it. He also told me I could come back and visit it whenever I wanted.

When I have gone back to London I’ve stopped in a time or two.

I don’t know why, but just seeing it is a comfort to me.