In our last episode, I recounted a bit of my father being the family shutterbug, and now it’s time to elaborate. I didn’t have very much time with my father growing up, for two big reasons. Firstly, my father was the top salesman for a company called Prestolite. Once upon a time, the ignition system in cars used some sort of alchemy called “points” which was replaced by an electronic ignition system, that these guys invented. (“Presto… lite!” featured prominently in their marketing.) Well, back in the days before Al Gore invented the internet, being a top salesman meant traveling. A lot of traveling, on the order of leaving Monday morning and getting home Friday afternoon. He would mostly drive and sometimes fly off to exotic locales like Toledo and Louisville, and always had stories and, without fail around the end of June, he could be counted on to have some questionably legal fireworks in the trunk of his car.
The other reason I didn’t get much time with my dad was because he had a bum ticker like most of the men on his side of the family and that a possible heart attack, of which he at least had one in my young memory, wasn’t any reason to bother a doctor. The reason that fireworks stick out so prominently in my memory was because he had left for his last business trip with promises of another beautiful, slightly dangerous display when he got back. He died alone in a hotel room on July 1st, in New Jersey of all places, just one day after his 30th wedding anniversary, the summer before my 10th birthday.
Shortly before all that happened however, something else occurred. My father was never one to spend an exorbitant amount of money on his hobby. That being said, if there was a new-fangled camera out there that he could justify to my mom, dad usually ended up with one. His last camera was a very fancy Minolta 110 that he liked because he could carry it everywhere. He also bought (to his and a lot of people’s regret) one of the first Kodak instant cameras, before Polaroid sued the pants off of them. As he was going through and weeding out some of his older collection, a cast-off was about to come into my possession. Not that I was ready to appreciate it…
I have owned, used, and seen many cameras in my day that I would unhesitatingly call beautiful; in the beauty pageant of cameras, this utilitarian brick would be lucky to bring home Miss Congeniality. The Brownie Super 27, this hand-me down from my dad, had just become my first camera. Not that the single-digit-year-old was going to be trusted with film, mind you, but it could be something I could play with instead of gathering dust on a shelf.
The first thing I was taken with was the small lever on the center front that swung open a large panel, with a shiny circular depression underneath. Being a kid whose kindergarten picture was taken in a Star Trek t-shirt, this was very reminiscent of Captain Kirk flipping open his communicator and thus, very cool to play with. Anyway, if you had tried to explain flashbulbs to me, I would probably neither have understood nor cared very much. I eventually got to playing with all the knobs and buttons and looking through it properly. I figured out the shutter button didn’t do much, until you ratcheted the knob next to it until it stopped, then the shutter rewarded me with a satisfying click. At that point, I could pretend to take pictures quite realistically, which I assume tickled my dad quite a bit.
I never took any actual pictures with this camera, but that didn’t matter. It did not hold up well under the tender mercies of a little boy who saw it as more of a toy than a tool, and by the time I got into photography for real, 127 film was well on it’s way to extinction. My first 35mm camera I ever had was a cheap little Ansco compact I got to take on my school exchange program to Germany. My first SLR was a Pentax K1000 I bought (like so many other school kids) to take my first photography class. My first digital camera was a Nikon Coolpix 300, an ungainly thing that was trying to be the combination of a PDA and a camera, at a glorious 640x480 resolution.
But none of those were my first camera. My first camera was an ugly brick I never shot a frame of film with, and only ever used to have Scotty beam me up. It also let me pretend to be just like a grownup and more importantly, just like my dad. Did that set me on the path that led me to being a photographer? Who knows? At this point in time, my long-term goal still was to go to Hollywood when I grew up and be a stunt man in the movies, so I can’t really say that this set me on the path. It probably gave me a little nudge though, and sometimes those little nudges make all the difference.
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