It was sometime in February of 1989. I was in my senior year of high school and had taken, as you might well imagine, photography as my elective class. The first semester was very basic introduction to things and all the few materials we required were provided for us. The second semester went beyond the basics and invited us to expand our horizons a bit, but we were going to have to source our own supplies.
Imagine walking into a business that was quaintly unique in its own time, and would be unbelievable now; such was Baker’s Photo Supply in 1989. A dusty hoarder’s paradise of everything photographic, from the very current to dimly remembered history. I had been in there only once before, years ago; since no one else was interested in dad’s old gear, it pretty much all came my way.
Included in this haul was an old Revere movie camera, which I played around with for a time. I had gone to Baker’s to buy a roll of film for it and was greeted with the incomprehensible question: “Is it Regular 8 or Super 8?” The dumbfounded look on my face caused the ladies at the film counter to take pity on me. “Does your camera look like you have to thread the film in a loop or is it a black box you just sort of pop in?” Regular 8 it was and for the first of what would be a million times, those ladies did not steer me wrong.
Today I was heading in with a couple of barely understood words scrawled on a note from class. I needed to buy a box of photo paper, hoping they would again steer me in the right direction. The ladies called out and a man came from the back of the shop and found me what I needed. I thanked him and told him I was taking a class in high school and quite probably would be back often. Then he said it: “You looking for a job? Talk to her” and pointed to the older of the two ladies at the film counter.
That lady was Ruline B. Baker, the “mom” of the mom & pop that owned the place. I talked to her for a couple of minutes; she vaguely remembered me from the movie film episode (more on that in a bit) and knew I lived in the neighborhood. She’d be willing to try me out working afterschool on weekdays and all day on Saturdays, if I was interested. All I had to do was go downtown and get a D.C. work permit since I was still under 18. I said I would and she said I could start when all my paperwork was in order. So, on March 2nd (I remember the date exactly because it coincidentally was Mrs. Baker’s birthday), I became Baker’s Photo’s newest employee.
Now, I didn’t know it, but among the photo shops in Washington DC at the time, Baker’s had a bit of a reputation. They had the highest prices in town for new goods. The cost was sometimes well worth it because you could get anything there; especially if it was old and hard to find. Someone would pull out a box off of a shelf, blow untold years of dust off of it, and miraculously pull out the exact widget you were looking for. Also, everyone there was a little bit nuts; you had to be ready for that, but if you didn’t know how to do something photographically, they’d figure out how to get it done.
The business was founded in 1947 by Abraham J. Baker and his wife Ruline. He had been a photographer for years prior to setting up the shop and, as the saying goes, had forgotten more about cameras and photography than most people knew. He was very much a curmudgeon and could be brusque with people sometimes, but he always had time to explain something you didn’t know. You could learn an awful lot from him, once he got used to you.
Mrs. Baker, on the other hand, was the heart and soul of that place. Prior to marrying Abe, she had worked for the railroad and had done some sort of accounting work for them. Even at her advanced age, she had an uncanny memory for names and faces and would greet customers she hadn’t seen in years by name as if they were old friends. She also had a carry-over from her old career in the form of a giant green boat anchor of a contraption called a Comptometer. Her hands would fly over this thing like lightning and add a list of figures faster than any young kid with an electronic calculator.
The beginning of my work at Baker’s taught me a few things very quickly: I knew nothing about photography. I knew nothing about how a business was run. I was going to learn, whether I liked it or not.
There were essentially two classes of employees at Baker’s: there were a couple of people that worked for them at their first location, came with them when they moved from up the street (giving way to The Dancing Crab restaurant, a DC icon in its own right), and would be with them till they dropped. The other class was my mine; a high school kid or American University student that would be here for a summer or a semester and move on. Or at least, I thought that was my class…
You see, the Baker’s never had children of their own. The kids that would come and work in the store were the Baker’s kids. I worked there through graduation and the summer after and quit when I began attending college in the fall. I was in the engineering program and made it through the first semester when I came to a realization: it was what I was good at, but not what I loved. In what was the scariest moment of my life up to that point, I went to my mother and told her that I wanted to leave engineering and study photography.
“Do they give a degree in that?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not dropping out of college?”
“No, mom, I’m just changing my major.”
“Ok. Do what makes you happy.”
I was not expecting our exchange to go nearly that well. With my immediate future planned, I went back to Baker’s to see if I could beg for my old job back. After unloading my story to Mrs. Baker, her response was very simple: “You never really left.” Once a Baker’s kid, always a Baker’s kid.
Thus, my job, that began as my “after school, work through the summer, make some pocket money, temporary” job became more of an eight year apprenticeship. From Mr. Baker, I learned as much about the nuts and bolts of photography than I ever learned in college. (Sorry, mom.) From Mrs. Baker, I learned how to run a business. I learned how to make every client feel good by always remembering their name and a few details about them. I learned how to insult a difficult client without letting them know they’ve been insulted. I learned how to smooth over a client when we screwed up. All of these things were to come in handy in my later career.
In 1992, when I got my cancer diagnosis and spent most of that summer in George Washington University hospital, my mother would pass Baker’s on the way to the subway to visit me. Mrs. Baker frequently stopped her, with a funny card or a joke she wanted to tell me, or just to let her know that my whole Baker’s family was thinking about me. One of her “kids” was sick and she was worried too.
In 1995, things started to go wrong. Both the Bakers were very elderly by this time, and Mrs. Baker had a severe stroke. It was a terrible thing because we all had such genuine affection for her and to see her razor-sharp mind just disintegrate was heartbreaking. She was pretty much home-bound after that and under round the clock care. Mr. Baker managed to get her loaded into the car just once and park out front so we could see her; she was so diminished, it was painful to see, and she passed not long after.
The next year, Mr. Baker fell and badly broke his leg. His only remaining family was a sister and brother-in-law who wanted nothing to do with the shop, so when he could no longer get around, they pressured him to liquidate the business. Just shy of fifty years of being an icon of photography in Washington DC, the place closed with a quiet whimper. I confess to have greatly disappointed Mr. Baker. As I was about to be out of a job imminently, I was contacted by Falls, a competitor in Virginia with a job offer. He had expected all his employees to go down with the ship but I manned my lifeboat about six weeks before the end. A couple of the old-timers attempted to open their own shop, under a new name and in a different location, but the magic was gone and it folded quickly.
Falls wasn’t much longer for this world either, sadly. The two oncoming storms that were digital photography and the rise of the big box stores were doing in most mom & pops. Only the largest chains were able to hold on, and I ended up at Penn. I was there for almost ten years, working my way up from the bottom (again). I watched the chemical darkroom to go mostly the way of the dinosaur, and I saw the megapixel wars finally plateau; there just wasn’t a markedly better camera out every nine months anymore. I finally got the job I wanted along the way though: head honcho of my own store at 1015 18th St NW. For about two years, anyway; being in charge wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. That was when me and mine made the decision to head for Maine. It was just as well; with the rise of Facebook, no one was printing photos anymore and with the rise of Amazon and the smartphone, hardly anyone was buying cameras at their local shop. The writing had been on the wall, and Penn went bankrupt a couple years after I left.
As it says when you look at my social media, these days, I’m a photographer for love instead of money now. I probably would have grown up to remain a very avid amateur and become an unhappy mechanical engineer, if not for one visit to a one-of-a-kind photo shop, on a wintry day when I was 17.
And that is how it all started
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