Vintage camera proves to be a challenge

I have always had a fascination with cameras. Not how they worked, but the memories that you can capture. Both of my parents had a good eye, so my growing up years were filled with amazing photos of national parks, beaches and forests that they would often share with their friends.

Every weekend, we would prepare for our parent’s Sunday evening guests. The five of us siblings knew if it was going to be a good night or not by the preparation. If Mom was on a cleaning frenzy for most of the afternoon, we knew that “Mrs. Clean” was coming over. If Mom baked a cake, we knew that the church’s prize-winning baker was on her way.

Homemade cookies equaled dear old friends and Oreo cookies and a couple of Twinkies meant that George and Kay, my parent’s dearest friends, would be visiting.

However, when the movie screen was put up, we knew we were in trouble! It meant that the evening would be filled with Mom and Dad showing and narrating either a slide or movie presentation of their latest trip.

Sometimes, we were interested and other times, we would just roll around on the floor in the dark pinching one another and were totally bored.

Presentations of trips on which we were on were tolerable, but when the movies of their 1958 trip to the Netherlands came on, we moaned and groaned. Who would be interested in seeing our relatives who still wore wooden shoes when they gardened, ate an entire meal of only cheese and bread and waved frantically at the camera every time they stepped out their front door?

When I was 10 years old, my parents gave me a Kodak Brownie Holiday Flash Camera. I was so excited! The gift included film: black and white because color was too costly to purchase and then develop. I took very few pictures but I thought each one proved that I was a budding Ansel Adams!

My “portfolio” included photos of my cousins sitting on a bale of hay, my dad driving the tractor and my little brother eating mud.

A school field trip resulted in eight pictures, including one of the feet of my best friend, half of a sign that attempted to say “Marineland,” my teacher without the top of her head eating her tuna fish sandwich (which now seems a bit inappropriate when you are touring an aquarium) and the tail of a dolphin as it jumped back into the water.

I was especially proud of the one that I took through the lower window of a fish tank of the lower windows on the other side of the fish tank. Three were blurs of fish swimming and the last one was either a squid, octopus, or bowl of spaghetti.

After a year of pretending I was photojournalist Jimmy Olsen on Superman, I set aside my camera and concentrated on becoming a pre-teen and attempted to discover why some of my friends thought that Dick Clark’s American Bandstand was better than The Mickey Mouse Club.

I didn’t think much about photography again until 1971 when my parents gave Pastor Pete and I a Bell & Howell 35mm SLR camera. As somewhat newlyweds, we were thrilled to have such a great camera, especially one that we could never afford ourselves.

The next day, Pastor Pete and I went to Disneyland and used our new camera to take what we thought were some great shots. On that day, we took photos of me with Mickey Mouse, Pastor Pete with Snow White and one of the two of us acting “goofy” with Goofy. We knew each one was a winner!

What impressed us most about the camera was how long the slide film lasted. The salesperson at the camera shop told us that you could get a few more than the “expected 36” on a roll of film if you push it to the end. You can imagine how thrilled we were that we still had film left on the 40th shot. We carefully rewound the film and brought it to the camera shop for processing.

Five days later, we stopped to pick up our pictures and were shocked that not one slide had turned out! This was a major disappointment in my life! It’s right up there with the fact the existence of the Tooth Fairy is in question.

As a good Calvinistic child, I knew about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, but don’t take the Tooth Fairy away from me, especially now that I am so old that my permanent teeth are starting to fall out! I have a financial bonanza waiting with all the teeth that I still have left!

As we walked out of the photo shop in our “picture-less state,” I’ll admit it, but only this once, I cried. Now, I think, “How stupid was that! If my whole life rests on one roll of film, I have a major problem.” Now, I would gladly “lose” some of my pictures from that era in which I was donning “cha-cha boots” and a “bubble hairstyle.”

After composing myself, I determined what went wrong. I didn’t put the film in correctly. We were taking pictures without film going through the camera. I’m sure there is a life lesson here that Pastor Pete could use in a sermon, but he’s retired and seldom prepares a sermon, so I’m safe!

Now we laugh about it and I’m sure that if I had all of those “fantastic” missing slides of Disneyland, I wouldn’t be able to find them. If I did, the only way I could show them to anyone would be to hold them up to a light because we don’t even own a slide projector anymore.

After that fiasco, Pastor Pete took charge of the camera for a year and got some amazing shots. He really has a great eye!

The problem I have now – rather than learning to load film in a camera – is to discover a way to make Pastor Pete once again pick up a camera and go places with me. I’m sure that he could “out-shoot-me” any day.

I do have an extra digital SLR camera for him to use, but “somewhere” I think I still have the old Bell & Howell 35mm that we used in Disneyland. If I can’t find it, I found one on eBay for $9.99. It says that it’s “vintage” which is another way of saying, “It may be old and of no value but to some random person living somewhere in the world it might bring back precious memories!”

I’m going to now think of myself as a “vintage person.” It sounds so much better than being a senior citizen.