Category: History

The North High School Band

A tribute to Les Susi

Ask anyone who played an instrument about their experiences at Columbus, Ohio’s North High, and they would be sure to mention Les Susi first thing. While North High had plenty of gifted teachers, Les was a unique influence on so many lives. He was a teacher, a leader, a coach, a fine musician and a good friend. Let me tell you about how I met Les Susi.

In the spring of my 9^th grade year at Crestview Junior High, Les came to all the junior high schools to audition kids for the high school band and orchestra. There was also a Junior Band for those who weren’t quite ready. I was thrilled to learn that I made it into the Concert Band and amazed to learn that included being in the marching band during football season.

Practice for the marching band began in the last two weeks of August, two weeks before school started. We rehearsed from 8am-noon 5 days a week for two weeks, learning how to march and play together. Unlike New England where late August begins to cool off, the last two weeks of August in central Ohio were really hot! So, we did our outdoor practice first at 8am when it was cool and came inside later to work on music.

If you’ve watched military parades, the soldiers basically walk using the same sized step, usually around 30 inches, or 6 steps in 5 yards (180 inches). Marching bands mostly march using shorter 22.5” step, so you get 8 steps in 5 yards. This gives you time to pick up your feet higher, giving a flashy effect called the “piston step” or just “8 to 5.” It also matches the number of beats in 2 measures of a march.

Similarly, the military “about face” just means that you put one foot forward and pivot on the ball of your foot to reverse directions. But a common marching band about face is essentially “one-legged,” where you rotate on the ball of your left foot, while swinging your right leg around to give the momentum that creates the turn. This takes a bit of practice but looks pretty cool.

Marching together means that you all take the same sized steps so that each row marches down the field in a straight line. We practiced this a great deal. Our band had 9 rows of 8 players each, grouped by instrument section. The squad leaders marched on the outsides of each row checking that everyone stayed in line and calling them out if they got ahead or behind. This too took some practice.

The Music

But once it got hot out, we came inside for a break followed by music rehearsals. We were, I think, the first class to benefit from the new air-conditioned band room. (Thank goodness!) All the music we played had to be memorized. We didn’t carry music at all. So, we had to learn our parts for the school march, Polar Pep, the loyalty song (a tedious hymn) and the Star-Spangled Banner in both Bb and Ab, (the arrangements were different, not just transposed) and the National Emblem march.

Once we got beyond the basics, we started learning the music (and the formations) for the first half-time show. Again, we not only had to memorize the music, but where we stood in each formation and how we got there. We were in 9 rows of 8 players each, and unlike the Ohio State model, we were not an all-brass band. In addition to trumpets, trombones, baritone horns and tubas, our band included flutes, clarinets, and saxophones (I think both alto and tenor saxes). And of course, a whole row of percussion: bass drum, cymbals and snare drums for sure. Sometimes other percussion instruments sneaked into the half-time shows, too.

The rows had letters, and we were arranged alphabetically but only some letters were used. My row was R row, and we were all clarinets. I think the trumpets were in front. R row was second from the back. When Les gave out the charts for each formation, we were identified by our row letter and number, I think I was R3 the first year. The next year, I was an Asst Squad Leader in R8 and my senior year, I was the squad leader at R1.

So, for every formation, we got a drawing of the field and where each of us stood relative to the yard lines and the hash marks that help officials center the ball. It helped us center the band on the field in the same way, and we knew to head for a spot near a yard line and hash mark. When we first stood in the positions for these formations, Les would sometimes move people a bit to make the formation clearer. We noted that and memorized our positions.

Les was particular and insistent on excellence in our formations, our marching and our playing and let us know if we weren’t doing what he expected. During outdoor rehearsals, he carried a power megaphone to tell us on the field what we needed to do better. He was not above the occasional “dammit” when we screwed up but tried to remember that that carried into the classrooms in the building behind us, and to not swear into the megaphone.

To make sure that we didn’t let our attention wander, the band had several “I Goofed” signs to award players who made errors where they should have known better. I only got one once: I think my Junior year, when I was simply not paying attention. We were supposed to wear them all day, but I soon found that people pulling on the sign and could choke me, so I put it into locker and returned it the next day.

Every half time show had a topic, and we usually had a theme that we played when marching to each formation, as well a song segment we played while in position. We had to memorize all this music each week, but usually these were pretty short. I remember Les’s arrangement of “South America take it Away” was only about 16 bars long.

Les wrote his own arrangements for all the music we played on the field in his inimitable jazz-inflected harmonic style, which often include chords you never heard before in those tunes, including ninth chords and even thirteenths! They were always fun to play once we got our arms around them.

The high school football season was usually 11 games on successive Friday nights, with about half at home and half away. We had to have a new show for every home game, but when we went to away games, we usually repeated last week’s home game show.

When Les started at North in 1953, he brought his experience playing in the Ohio State Marching Band to North, including the pregame ceremony. The band members marched in line into their rows in the endzone to a drum cadence. Then, called to attention, they played the fanfare that starts Polar Pep. You can listen to it here, as recorded by us in 1960. Note the interesting harmonies in the fanfare, clearly written by Les Susi. At the end of the fanfare, during quick chords, the drum major struts through the middle of the band to the front, and then blows his whistle to start the band marching down the field playing the fight song. North was at the time the only high school with an original fight song, composed in the 1930s. But this arrangement clearly had Les’s touch, including a countermelody in the trombones and baritone horns.

When we got to the end other field, the other team’s band joined us, and we played one of two versions of the Star-Spangled Banner, and then marched back while playing National Emblem. At the end of the field, the drum major tossed his baton over the goal posts. During my Junior and Senior years, the drum major was my good friend Jim McDonald. We’d done some theater together and I knew that he was very talented indeed. I don’t think he missed the catch of his baton from those throws more than once in the two years we had him. Jim went on to study music education at Ohio State and eventually became the choir director at Crestview Junior High, and then moved up to assistant choir director at North, and finally became the choir director for a number of years until North was closed in 1979.

One unique formation Les developed for us was Script North, where the band spells out North in script with the drum major leading the way, and players dropping off the line to stand where each letter is formed. It took a lot of practice to get it right, but we always did it at Homecoming, at least. As far as we know, we were the only local high school attempting a script formation at the time.

After working together for 2 weeks in August and 1-1/2 hours every morning, we were a pretty tightly bound group and very proud of our band. In fact, I don’t think any of our competitor high schools quite reached the standards that Les had set for us, and that we mostly achieved.

Concert Band

Football season came to an end just before Thanksgiving, and suddenly we became a Concert Band, not a marching band. We come in at 8:45 for first period instead of at 8am for marching practice, and we are no longer excused from gym classes.

But concert band was a whole new experience for some of us. Les’s musical standards were very high and the music much more complex: it requires fingering and breathing techniques we never had time for on the field. Les said more than once, that it took him at least a month to get us to make the transition to more serious music making.

Instead of playing every Friday night, we now were preparing for Winter and Spring Concerts. And while some of the music is lightweight: some selections from Broadway and Folksong Suite, we also tackled more serious pieces like Gustav Holst’s Suites #1 and #2 for Military Band. We did the first suite my sophomore year and the second suite as part of concerts my junior year.

Here’s a professional recording of Suite #1. The first movement is called a Chaconne, which I gradually learned is a piece where the bass line repeats throughout the movement, as harmonies and other melodies slowly build on top of it. This style of music originated in organ pieces, but Holst shows how well it works for concert band.

We quickly learned that playing indoors in a concert band means playing less loud and more carefully in tune. And the music is considerably more challenging: we spent weeks woodshedding the Holst #1 that year.

Oh, and did I mention State Contest? Each year in the spring, the band jumped on busses to go somewhere to play for judges and get praise and criticism. And a rating. Les’s North High Band consistently received nearly all 1 ratings. Some of our sister schools usually went as well but few scored as high as often as we did. We played a piece of our choice, a piece that was required, and then were asked to sight read a piece we’d never seen before. The conductor was given 3 minutes to study the score, and 3 more minutes to tell us what to watch out for, and then we read through it as best as we could. But because of Les’s skill we often got 1’s in that section too.

During my Junior year, we tackled the Holst Suite #2, which presented different challenges, including a Fantasia that mixed the Irish dance tune, the Dargason with Greensleeves. By this time, I really began to truly appreciate classical music. When you slowly learn a piece as a group and see how it is put together, you begin to see the great power and beauty of classical music. On the other hand, we also played selections from the Music Man that year.

Our Senior year, Les dropped an enormous challenge on us. The American composer Vittorio Gianini was well known in classical band circles for a series of significant compositions, and in 1957 had just published Praeludium and Allegro. We begin tackling this modern, dissonant piece and initially hated it every day. But after a month or so, when we had gotten through its technical challenges, most of us fell in love with it and felt it was one of the best things we’d ever done. Here’s a professional recording. Here’s another version that is closer to our interpretation. Note how the Praeludium theme resurfaces under the Allegro about 6 minutes into the piece. We played it at our Spring Concert and thrilled the audience with it, and took it to State Contest, and got all 1’s.

In case you think that band is all Les did, you might be surprised to learn that he also taught the orchestra, a dance band and a woodwind ensemble. He also taught theory classes, and while I couldn’t schedule that class, he gave me some valuable advice when I got interested in music composition.

In Conclusion

Les Susi was and still is at 94, an amazing musician, teacher and leader. He helped us all grow as musicians and as leaders and taught us a lot about music we would never have learned any other way. When Whetstone High School opened in 1961, Les “was moved” there by Whetstone parent demand. He continued teaching there for 16 years and then was asked to lead the Fort Hayes Arts and Academic High School. He retired in 1986 but was already a member of the Brass Band of Columbus, as cornet soloist, associate conductor and chief arranger. Not only is he the person I remember most from North, he was probably the most demanding and got remarkable results. As my friend Sandy (Helm) Robert said to me, “he strove for perfection and frequently achieved it.”

I fell back in love with my Rollei SLR

In high school, I had a Yashica 6×6 and a Minolta 35mm. And while they were good for their time, my high school had a Rollei Twin Lens Reflex (TLR) for use of the photo group, and I just had to upgrade and get one of my own after using it.

My father bought me a used Rollei 3.5 for high school graduation and I held onto it and used it for nearly 40 years. If you want the complete list of cameras I owned, along with some pictures, I wrote about them a couple of years ago.

But in the 1990s, I started to see that my Rollei TLR images weren’t as sharp as they used to be. I felt that it would probably be too expensive to repair and sold it. Then I put together (quite) a bit more money and bought a slightly used Rolleiflex 6008 Integral SLR along with a grip and an extra film back (shown at top of article).

It has an f/2.8 80 mm PQ Planar (Zeiss) lens with leaf shutter up to 1/1000 of a second (for PQS lenses, and 1/500 for PQ lenses.) PQ stands for Professional Quality. This model was made from 1995-2002, and I believe I bought mine around 1997-8. And unlike the venerable TLRs, this camera has a huge variety of interchangeable lenses made for it.

The reviews of this Rollei SLR were really positive and still are. The camera has shutter priority, aperture priority manual and fully automatic exposure settings. It also has several TTL metering settings: center weighted mullti-zone, 1% spot and multi-spot metering. And since the film advance is battery driven, you can take multiple exposures a half second apart. These features put it far ahead of the competing Hasselblad.

While the camera performed well optically, it was plagued by the terrible batteries that Rollei provided. They didn’t hold much charge or last that long, and new batteries, which were expensive, were no better. So, I put it away and concentrated on a series of Nikon digital cameras: D70, D80, D7200 and now a Z6.

Not long ago, I thought I might be able to sell that Rollei and get a TLR instead. Of course, I had to make sure it worked. But of course, both batteries were dead and no longer chargeable. There are now after-market replacement batteries available, some of which simply welded in new rechargeable AA cells in the original Rollei battery case. But, most of them required an expensive new charger. Finally, I found a replacement battery system complete with charger on eBay from a user with the id mignon1. It works flawlessly and comes with a plug-in charger so you can recharge the battery without removing it from the camera!

I didn’t need a darkroom!

So, I took a few rolls of film on my “new” Rollei and was simply astonished at what a great camera it still is. My first rolls were using black and white film: TMax-400, Ilford HP5+ (ISO 400) and FP4+ (ISO 125). I developed them in my basement darkroom, loading the film into the developing tank inside a big changing bag I bought from Adorama. This bag is 25” x 22” x 17”, so you have plenty of room to unroll 120 film and spool it into your developing tank reel.

And, while I have a complete darkroom, it turns out that with a new Epson v600 scanner, I really never needed to fire up the Beseler enlarger. While the scanning software provided with the Epson scanner is perfectly adequate, you can get faster scans and a bit more flexibility by buying a copy of Silverfast. For black and white, it seems to manage resolution better, and it does a better job color rendering from color negatives than Epson scanning software does. The detail is amazing and the color quite stunning. I sent that roll to The Darkroom to develop the negatives, but did the scanning and printing here at home. It turns out you can also buy color C-41 developer kits quite cheaply, and there are only two baths rather than the old 5 or 6, so it is as simple as b/w processing.

Scanning

But does scanning do as good a job as analog enlargement? I ran some tests by printing out the same photo both ways, and could not see any difference at all! Scanning a 6×6 cm negative, gives you around a 100 megapixel scanned image: more than you’ll ever get from your digital camera, and the gray scales are identical as well. In examples below, the left hand image was scanned from the original negative, and right hand image was printed in the darkroom using Ilford Multigrade paper and a #3 contrast filter. They are essentially identical results even when printed at 8×10 inches.

Negative printed on Ilford Multigrade with #3 contrast and scanned from print.

(I will have to say that I can probably knock out 8×10 prints in the darkroom faster than going through all that scanning and printing, but photographic paper is way more expensive than printer paper, and I don’t have to wash out the trays afterwards.)

This Rollei SLR is built like a tank. Heavy, sturdy and well made and will probably last for many years. It does however, weigh nearly 5 lbs and the best way to carry it around is in a padded gadget bag that distributes the weight across your shoulders. I keep a tripod in my trunk, as well. If you are used to taking hundreds or thousands of shots a day, the Rollei makes you rethink your composition, since each roll has only 12 shots. You will find that every shot is likely to be a winner. Think of the Rollei as a more portable view camera that can get the high-resolution pictures you really wanted.

So I’m not selling my Rollei 6008! It’s the best “new” camera I ever bought!

I probably developed your film

Kisco Photo Service

If you lived in Columbus, Ohio in 1960 and took your film “to the drugstore” to be developed, it probably passed through my hands. My first major summer job was that year: I worked for Kisco Photo Service in a small building at Goodale and High St. This was essentially a family business owned by Mr Kissinger (I think) and more or less managed by his son in law, the smooth-talking Bill Smith. I seem to recall there being jokes along the line of “I wonder whose Kissinger now?”

Kisco Photo Service had a network of drug stores they serviced throughout Central Ohio. Their drivers picked up the film from these stores and dropped off the negatives and prints a couple of days later. While most of their business was still black and white printing, they did process Kodacolor and print it. They did not handle slides, but probably sent any out to another lab.

I was an avid photographer all through high school and had my own darkroom, where I did my own developing and printing: mostly black and white, but Jeff Luce and I got together and processed and printed some color from time to time. I had spent afternoons and Saturdays of my senior year as a darkroom assistant for Al Lupidi photography and Longview and High.

So, when looking for a summer job, when Al’s summer business didn’t warrant help, I took the bus down to Kisco with a resume in hand and talked myself into a summer job. As I recall, seniors got out of school nearly a week before our graduation and all-night party, so I started work that week and took off two days around graduation the following week. Since we were a 1-car family and my father mostly drove to work, I rode my bike down to Clinton School (back where this all started) locked my bike to a bike rack there and walked across High Street (or took the underpass) to catch the bus.

My boss was Billy Hillscher, who oversaw operations, and he introduced me to Ellen who worked developing the black and white film. I became her assistant, and since I already knew how to open film rolls and cartridges I was that far ahead of where they expected.

The film developing took place in a long, completely dark room, with a machine that moved the film through four tanks and then out through a light lock to a drying room, where the film was taken to be printed.

We stood at the beginning of the tank and received film and the original envelopes tucked into clips in a wooden bar that would hold five or six rolls of film. The film was loaded onto the bars outside our room, by intake people, who placed the bars in a rotating 3-sided lazy Susan. When they had loaded enough bars, they knocked on the wooden housing and rotated the film into our dark room.

Here we placed the bar on the front of the developing machine, opened each film roll or cannister and clipped to film to the bar, and attached a weight to the bottom end of the roll. This was tricky in the dark. Roll film was taped inside a black paper backing, so you had to unroll the trailing end (since it was now reversed), clip it to the bar, pull down the paper, and tear through the tape at the other end. The 35mm cannisters were actually easier: you just rapped the long end on any hard surface and the other end popped off, so you lift out the spool of film. (This doesn’t work anymore. Kodak decided people were reloading them, so now you need a bottle opener to pull off the end, which destroys the cannister.)

Then we moved the bar from the holding position to the machine’s moving chain, that raised the bar up about 5 feet, moved it forward and lowered the film into the film developer. The bars sat in notched on two chains on either side of the tank, that slowly moved forward about one notch every 30 seconds, coming to the end of the developing tank in about 8 minutes. At the point, the bars were lifted on the chain up and down into the second tank which was a rinse to stop the development process, and then on into the third tank which contained the film fixer or “hypo,” (actually sodium thiosulfate) which dissolved the parts of the film that contained no image, essentially the black areas in the photo. The film went up and down into the fourth rinse tank and then out into the drying room.

“Fine Grain” developing

Occasionally, someone would request “fine grain developing.” What each actually happened was that we put all of those rolls requesting fine grain on a single bar, and when the film came down into the developing tank, we reach in and moved the film ahead two notches in the tank, so they would be developed a bit less. But since this was the same developer, there was a little hooey going on here, and the company charged the customers extra for this hooey.

However, in those days, most people were still using Kodak Verichrome Pan, which was a film designed for amateur photographers who used box cameras and other simple devices. The film had such a wide exposure latitude that it was pretty impossible to screw up your film exposure (or development). We also saw some Tri-X pan which was more of a professional quality film, and more light-sensitive.

Most of the film we handled was 120 or 620, which produce 12 6×6 cm negatives on a roll, or 127 which produced 12 smaller images on narrower film. We also had a significant amount of 35mm film come in, mostly 20 exposure rolls, but when we got 36 exposure rolls, these were longer than the 4 foot depth of the developing tanks, so we had to loop the film down and up the adjacent clip on the film bar so it didn’t hit bottom. The people that attended the film in the drying room unhooked one end and attached a weight so the film would dry without a water spot in the middle where the loop had been.

When the film was dry, it went on to the printers, who were a series of (mainly) women who sat at little consoles and centered each image manually using a little display, and then press “Print,” which exposed the next few inches of a roll or photo sensitive paper, entirely enclosed in the printer console, so they could work in an illuminated room. The rolls of paper were developed within each console, I think and then cut into individual pictures. The printer people had some control over the exposure of the printing paper and if they mis-guessed, this was caught when the prints were cut up and those negatives were reprinted.

Trouble

You may think that this idyllic life was all there was to processing film, but of course, there were always snags. Once and a while, Ellen and I would have loaded all the film that had come in into the machine and went out into the light and had a coffee (her) or a Coke (me). But sometimes we’d be standing there when we heard a terrible CLANKA CLANKA CLANKA coming from the machine and we ran back into the dark room. Ellen pulled out a little flashlight with a green filter over the lens and we looked for what was stuck. Usually, we had to turn off the machine and rescue the film bar that had gotten stuck diagonally across the chains, and then hurriedly turn it back on, perhaps advancing the film to make up for the amount of time it had already been in the developer. If we acted quickly, nothing was lost.

Kisco had two drivers, Jimmy and Chuck that went out to all the drugstores on their route and delivered and brought back film in batched several times a day. But there was one time a day, usually around 10:30 or so, when there would be a frantic knocking on the film door and the word “Whiston” being shouted at us.

It turns out that this referred to Whiston Pharmacy in Mount Horeb, Ohio. Apparently, they had an arrangement with Whiston that their film would be back the same day, perhaps because of the distance and the route the driver drove, and we had to drop everything and move film to Whiston to the front of the line, so it would get to the printers and back to the drivers in a few hours. Amazingly enough, this pharmacy is still in business some sixty years after I worked at Kisco. Kisco is, of course, long gone.

Color

The color developing and printing was a much smaller part of the business. All the color film was developed personally by Hillscher, so there couldn’t have been that much. There were three color printing consoles for making the final prints. These were operated by women who came in later, because of how long developing the color film took, and, incidentally, dressed a lot better than their black and white printing colleagues.

I did get an employee discount to have my own film processed, and I had recently gotten my first electronic flash or speedlight, or “stroboflash” in older argot. So, I shot a roll of color to try out my new toy, and brought it in. I remarked to Ellen that I hope the strobe exposed film would come out OK.

Well, for this, I got called on the carpet, because, not realizing that the pictures were exposed with an electronic flash, they printed them assuming I had use regular flashbulbs. Now, regular flashbulbs had a much warmer color to them then do electronic flash shots, which tend to have a bluish cast. Hillscher was furious with me that I hadn’t marked them “strobe exposed,” and when he saw the first prints, he had to have them all done over. Not only was I being berated for something I never heard of before, but it was clear this stuff was all pretty new to them, too. I think I did one more roll with Kisco with mixed results and decided I would be better off sending my color prints to the nearby Kodak processing lab in Findlay.

Clarinet

I played clarinet all three years in the North High School band but was worried that when I got to Oberlin College, I wouldn’t be accomplished enough to join the Oberlin Concert Band. Several other clarinetists had moved on to take lessons with Dr Don McGinnis at the OSU school of music. So, I asked my mother if she could call him during my workday and see if he could take me on for a few lessons that summer. Well, as soon as she told him that I was going to Oberlin, he exclaimed: “Oberlin! That’s my school.” And I was in.

So, on Wednesdays, I took my clarinet to work and then took the bus up to the OSU campus. I walked over to the music school for my lesson. He was great, and improved me quite a bit, and I did get to play in the band in college.

But one Wednesday, Hillscher asked me if I could clean the stockroom, which amounted to mopping the floors and waxing them. Needless to say, this wasn’t an elegant operation, and I arrived for my lesson covered with schmutz! But he let me in anyway.

I spent a couple of days later in the week, inventorying their stockroom. I suspect that few of the others really were great readers, but it wasn’t too difficult. Thanks? No, not really.

Taking my leave

When I accepted the job offer, Bill Smith had promised me a raise once I had become experienced. That never happened, and when my parents asked if I wanted to come on vacation with them in August before leaving for college, I agreed and gave Kisco my notice. I know Kisco had wanted me to work a bit longer, but I felt it was time to get out, so I did.

The next summer, I help paint lines on the streets of Columbus, but that’s another story.

Flameout- the story of why IBM Instruments crashed and burned

In the summer of 1978, a group of IBM executives met in Armonk to form the Instrument Systems Task Force and explore IBM’s entry into the chemical analytical instrument business. The IBM PC was not yet even a glimmer in Don Estridge’s eye, and the only well-known personal computers were the Apple II, the Tandy TRS-80 and the Commodore Pet.

By October, IBM’s Corporate Management Committee had approved the venture and IBM Instruments was soon formed. This book explores and memorializes the rise and successes of IBM Instruments and its eventual demise, only about 6 years after it was announced. To many, this was a shocking failure from one of the greatest computer companies in the world, and it is worth taking some time to examine how the Instrument Division grew and how it finally was shut down.

It tells the never-before written full story of IBM Instruments and why everyone who worked there misses it.

This corporate Greek tragedy details the ideas for great products like a redesigned NMR spectrometer console that concealed obsolete electronics, to a desktop computer far ahead of its time that received far too little support.

Successes included an excellent AF series NMR spectrometer and an IR spectrometer based on new PC-AT, as well as a satellite PCNMR workstation package for the PC-AT that revolutionized the organization of NMR labs.

But eventually, IBM’s Instrument business unit was shut down and we all went off to other jobs. What they did wrong was mostly management-based, not technical and the book explains it in detail.

Flameout: The rise and fall of IBM Instruments- a business study wad just published and is a great book for anyone interested on how small businesses grow and sometimes do not. Early readers have called it

“A must-read! “
“I think the book deals with some important issues still relevant today.“
“The value of writing these things up is huge”.

The book is available on Amazon.

My life in cameras

I’ve been interested in photography from a really early age, and here is why it happened.

The Wheaties camera

I first got interested in taking pictures when I found I could get an actual working camera for 55 cents and a Wheaties boxtop. I was about 7 years old and this was pretty exciting for me. Mine used 127 film which you then “took to the drugstore” to have processed. You got back little contact prints about 1” x 1.5”. I’m not sure if enlargements were yet available, but enlargements from such a cheap camera would have been pretty awful. Some years later, I actually had a summer job at the local photofinisher that serviced all those drugstores. But that’s another story.

These promotional cameras were made by Regal Galter of Chicago, and were available with various nameplates. While they were little more than toys, they did take actual pictures and I took a lot of pictures, especially on vacation or when we took visitors to nearby Niagara Falls.

This was really a learning experience, and I am sure most of my pictures were terrible, but every mistake led to more chances to learn. Of course, the camera had no settings for shutter speed or lens opening. And, in those days, the only 127 film type was Kodak Verichrome Pan, a very forgiving, wide latitude film that produced reasonable pictures over a wide variety of lighting conditions. This was, of course, an outdoor, daylight camera. Inside shots and flash pictures were still in the future.

The Brownie Hawkeye

When I was about 11, and in about 6^th grade, my parents surprised me with a wonderful new camera, the Kodak Brownie Hawkeye. It used 620 film, producing negatives that were 2 ¼ x 2 ¼ inches (or 6 x 6 cm). The bakelite Brownie had a bright prism waist-level viewfinder, and there were a number of types of film available for it, including Verichrome Pan, Tri-X and Kodacolor. The flash attachment used flashbulbs, of course, and while you could use ordinary white flahsbulbs you could get blue flashbulbs to simulate the outdoor color balance for outdoor Kodacolor. (Color film came in outdoor and incandescent in those days.) Contact prints from these 2 ¼” square negatives were decent sized, and the camera quality was sufficient to stand enlargement to “oversize” prints if you wanted to pay for it.

The Brownie Hawkeye was made from 1949-1961, with the flash model introduced in 1950. It was the most popular Brownie ever made, and you can still find them around pretty easily. They make good stage props and there was a recent men’s clothing ad where the model was using a Brownie Hawkeye, but was foolishly holding it up to his eye! The original Brownie Hawkeye cost $5.50 and the flash model $7.00!

This Brownie went with me on all our vacations and I even got to take it to school on occasion to snap pictures of my friends.

As I moved on into Junior High School, I became interested in developing and printing my own pictures, and the 620 film was easy to handle and contact print. I developed the film in a little plastic tank using Microdol-X or D-76 and contact printed the negatives. It was clearly time for an upgrade.

My Yashica was my first medium format camera

In about eighth grade, I bought a Yashica (probably using my paper route money): a pretty good quality twin lens reflex, using 120 film and still making 2 ¼” square negatives. The Yashica had a f 2.8 viewing lens which projected onto a ground glass screen for focusing, and a f/3.5 taking lens. This was my first camera that allowed focusing, as well as setting of the lens opening and shutter speed. This was a huge learning experience, and it was a good thing I could develop the film myself, because I ran through a lot of getting the hang of setting the exposure correctly. I used the Brockway incident light meter as well. And it was the first camera with decent resolution that allowed good enlargements.

The two knobs on the front controlled the lens opening and shutter speed, and the large knob on the side moved the two lenses in and out for focusing. The rear knob was for advancing the film. I don’t think there was an interlock to prevent double exposures, though. And there was no film advance that assured that you moved the film far enough. You had to look at the numbers on the back of the film paper that were displayed in the window on the back of the camera.

Around this same time, a took possession of a used enlarger much like the Kodak enlarger shown here, which really opening my vistas to making contact sheets, and making small enlargements on Kodak Medalist paper, developed in Dektol. This enlarger was a diffusion model, where the enlarger lamp is diffused through ground glass and passed through the negative and then to the enlarger lens.

That Yashica was my main camera throughout high school. I used it for sports photography and group photos of all kinds.

Ventures into 35mm

Around this time, 1957 or so, 35mm cameras were getting better and cheaper and my father bought me a Minolta 35mm camera. I was soon taking so many candid pictures with it that I started spooling my own bulk film into 35mm cassettes. In those days, you could reuse standard Kodak cartridges, but Kodak put an end to that in about 1964 by crimping the ends so you had to use a bottle opening to pull them open.

The Minolta was only my second adjustable camera, where I took light meter readings and set the camera accordingly. The camera was well built, and I used it throughout high school for all my candid work for the yearbook. It did not feature interchangeable lenses, however.

It also introduced the possibility of color slides, which I dived into as well. And in fact, it turns out you can process your own Ektachrome, and I did that for some years to save money and for instant gratification. During high school, my friend Jeff Luce and I did some color film processing and printing (from 2 ¼” square negatives) It was a lot of fun, but took an awful lot of work. This did, however, give us a chance to crop and adjust the darkness if our photos.

This was also about the time that I switched to the Nikor stainless steel film processing tanks that I still have and use. It takes a little practice to load them, but once you get the hang of it, they are very easy to load in the dark or even in a changing bag. This is probably now one of photography’s great lost skills! Sadly these tanks are no longer made, although other vendors have similar models.

The Kodak Retina

Around the start of the senior year in high school, the Minolta was not all it could be, and I looked around for a camera with sharper optics. I settled on the rather unique Kodak Retina IIc, a German made camera with an f/3.5 Schneider Xenon lens, and shutter speeds to 1/500^th. It had a built in light meter and introduced (to me at least) the LVS or Light Value System, later called the EV or exposure Value system.

You matched a pointer to the light meter needle on the top of the camera, and that gave you a single LVS number. You set that LVS number on a wheel at the bottom of the lens, and it locked together all the f/stops and shutter speed combinations that would give you that exposure.

The Retina had a very sharp lens, rivalling the Nikons I later went to. While there were two additional lenses available: wide angle and short telephoto, they only replaced the front elements, not the whole lens and I never looked into them.

Later on that year, my father bought a Retina IIIc, which was the same camera with a f/2 lens, and that is the one pictured here. It still works very well.

I used the Retina IIc all through the rest of high school and nearly all of college as my camera for candids, and having joined the yearbook staff right away, I had access to a very good darkroom.

My Rolleiflex

In early January of my Senior year in high school, a friend of mine who worked at a local photo store called me to say that a used Rolleiflex had just come in that was in immaculate condition and I ought to get it immediately. My father worked near there and I called and asked him to take a look. He told me it had been sold, but didn’t tell me that he’d bought it for my birthday.

This was one highest quality cameras I’d ever had. It had a f/2,8 viewing lens and an f/3.5 taking lens and a film transport system that assured that the roll would always be advanced the correct amount. I used this all through my college career along with the Retina. And I had that camera for 40 years after that. It took outstanding photos.

Moving on to Nikons

In my senior year in college, I wanted to move on to a camera with interchangeable lenses and high quality optics. Selling my Retina combined with a small early graduation present, I put together enough money to either buy a Nikon F or a Nikkorex F plus a Sigma 60mm-200mm zoom lens. They were about the same price. The Nikon F was a thoroughly professional-grade camera of its time, and the NIkkorex was intended for the amateur market. It had excellent Nikon optics but instead of the usual focal plane shutter, had a Copal Square metal blade shutter. I chose the latter because it seemed like a bargain to an impecunious college student.

When I got the Nikkorex, I found that that shutter was hardly silent and was roughly as noisy as a bear trap. Just the thing for shooting wedding ceremonies! Much later, I learned that this Nikkorex was sort of a joint project between Nikon and Mamiya, who actually manufactured the camera. That model was later sold by Ricoh, and Nikon went on to produce a number of Nikkormat cameras for the amateur market.

What can I say? It may not have been top of the line, but I used that Nikkorex all through graduate school and while raising a young family. It may have been a bit noisy, but the optical quality was very good.

Finally, a real Nikon

While teaching at Tufts, I wrote a number of books, and the royalties from my first book and second book enabled me to finally trade my Nikkorex in for a Nikon F3, one of Nikon’s most popular film cameras of all time. Of course, the Sigma zoom lens worked with the new Nikon just fine. I also managed to buy a new Beseler 23 C enlarger.

This Nikon F3 that I bought in 1980 was a workhorse camera for me for years: I didn’t seek to upgrade until digital cameras became more common in the early 2000s. I still have it and it works just as well as the day I got it.

Replacing the Rollei

By the early 2000s, my Rolleiflex was showing the signs of age. It just didn’t produce as sharp images as it once did, and it seemed ill-advised to spent money on repairing a 40 or more year old camera that was no longer made, so I sold it and bought a used single lens reflex Rollei 6008. This is a battery driven camera with through the lens metering and interchangeable 120 (or 220) film magazines, so you could switch from black and white to color, or between different film speeds mid-roll. The film advance was automatic, and while there were other lenses available for it, their prices were astronomical.

I took some photos with it recently and it remains an amazing machine: solidly build with incredible resolution. It is not autofocus, although Rollei did make a model that was at some exorbitant price. The producers of the Rollei line, Frank & Heidecke, went out of business in 2009 and Rolleis are no longer being produced, although there are a large number in the used market.

Frankly, this is a camera that only a tripod can love, since with the hand grip it weighs 79 oz or nearly 5 lbs. Its images are unsurpassed, however.

My journey into digital cameras

In 2001, digital cameras became price accessible, although still of just moderate quality. My first digital camera was the Nikon e995 Coolpix which was really only suitable for making small pictures for a web site, with e megapixel resolution (2048 x 1536). Nonetheless, it was good for closeups and I used it for about 3 years.

The Nikon D70

This was a 6 megapixel camera (2000 x 3008) that stood me in good stead for 4 years. It had a good zoom lens (18-70mm f/3.5-5.6) that was considerably more light sensitive than the previous Coolpix, and the lenses were interchangeable. I soon got a telephoto zoom(70mm-300mm) for it as well. And with that resolution, I could take good quality stage pictures easily.

The Nikon D80

Four years later, I upgraded to the Nikon D80 to further improve resolution to 10 mexapixels (3872×2592), but kept the same lenses. This workhorse camera stood me in good stead for tens of thousands of pictures of all kinds. It was the first one that I felt I could make decent enlargements from and many of those are still hanging around our house.

Nikon D7200

I finally moved to a Nikon D7200 (24 megapixels) in 2017 and with it a new kit zoom lens, since the one I used with the D70 and D80 needed replacement from heavy use. But the 70-300mm telephoto remained in happy use. This was the first camera I’d had that would also do movies. It was a handy feature but I personally didn’t use it all that often. But the higher resolution was a great boon for landscape photography as well as stage photography.

The Nikon Z6

You would think that this should be the end of the story, but all of those digital cameras above used a 24 x 16 mm sensor, called DX format, while a full frame sensor would be 24 x 36 mm, or FX format. These full frame sensors can have the same number of pixels as the DX cameras and produce a much sharper image.

This year, Nikon introduced the Z6 (and Z7) cameras which had a full frame sensor and 24 megapixels (or 45 for the Z7). It is also a mirrorless camera that reduces vibration as well as the shutter sound since there is no mirror to flip out of the way. It has gotten very good reviews, included one I wrote comparing it to the D7200. However, Nikon also introduced a new Z lens mount and an accompanying adapter for recent older lenses, while they develop new Z-mount lenses.

This is simply the sharpest camera of any kind I have ever had, and an absolute joy to use. I haven’t been on any picturesque vacations yet using the Z6, but here is a lovely local picture that shows its sharpness.

Conclusions

I wouldn’t be the photographer I’ve become without all those experiences, and starting at a young age was part of it. Only that way do you become entranced with the magic of film, seeing the prints and learning what works. And the magic of seeing prints develop in a darkroom tray is a thrill that few experience any more.

It’s easy to carry around your digital camera and never download or print any of those pictures, but that is a big mistake. The reward of beautiful prints is worth a little effort and is a big part of the learning experience that can make you a better photographer.

To some extent having a little digital camera in your phone bypasses all these steps and make photography seem routine. Again, starting young is still a step on the way to build confidence in your creativity and you should do your best to encourage young people to do more than take snapshots. And they should make some prints, too!

On being a paper boy in the 50s

In Columbus, at the corner of North High and W.N. Broadway there was an Isaly’s store in the 1950s. This popular dairy store served their famous Skyscraper cones, sundaes, sodas, shakes and sold cheeses and cold cuts, included their famous Chipped Chopped Ham. Since Isaly’s was right next to the Clinton Theater, they did a good business after every show. I gave them my business for another reason.

If you walked west on W.N. Broadway about half a block, you would come to an alley, and just up the alley on the left was a small frame building painted dark green. It was maybe 10’ x 16’ in size and locked with a padlock much of the day. But around 3pm, the Station Manager opened the building so you could see shelves running down each side and a counter in the rear. This is where I and other paper boys (there were soon some paper girls, too although not at that particular substation) picked up our papers every afternoon.

Columbus, in the mid-1950s was a city of about 380,000 (Greater Columbus was probably half a million) and had three newspapers: the Columbus Dispatch, the Columbus Citizen and the Ohio State Journal. The Dispatch and Citizen were evening papers and the Journal a morning paper. Each of these were at that time independently owned, with the Columbus Dispatch, the largest in circulation and advertising being held by the powerful (and somewhat secretive) Wolfe family.

The Columbus Citizen was part of the Scripps-Howard media empire, and the Journal was held over the years by a number of owners.

Politically, Ohio was definitively a Republican state and the Dispatch was clearly a rock-ribbed Republican newspaper. Ohio went for Eisenhower in the 50s and for Nixon over Kennedy in 1960. Only a few counties around Cleveland went for Kennedy. However, by 1964 most of Ohio went for Johnson over Goldwater. But after that, Ohio has remained Republican most of the time until Obama, although considered a “swing state” by some currently.

I lived at the end of East Longview in Columbus, but our modest 3 bedroom 1-bath house faced the Walhalla ravine and had a Walhalla address. From there I could easily bike to Clinton Elementary School, just a few blocks away, and later to Crestview Junior High when I entered seventh grade. It was about that time that I became a paper carrier. I think that the paper sent notices to the classes of rising seventh graders inviting them to apply for paper carrier jobs, and I applied.

In any case, soon after I started Junior High in the fall of 1954, I began my paper route. I would bike home, leave my schoolbooks and grab my paper bags and bike down to the substation behind Isaly’s. Many days I beat the truck that left the papers off at the substation. We’d all be sitting around on the shelves waiting until some sharp eyed boy spotted the truck and called out “Papers!” We’d all grab the bundles out of the truck and bring them into the station, where the young station manager, Jim Lawson, would count them into groups and hand them out to each of us, more or less in the order we had arrived.

While we could go off right away to deliver the papers, many of us stayed to fold the papers to make them easier to throw onto a customer’s porches. We could use rubber bands, but most of us learned how to fold newspapers quickly by tucking the folded section into the opening on the spine side of the paper. A quick twist and these papers were very stable for throwing without messing with rubber bands. It became a point of pride among the carriers to be able to fold your entire route’s papers in a couple of minutes before setting out. I only used rubber bands to secure the Sunday papers, which were a bit larger.

I did stop off at Isaly’s from time to time, and in June they had a Dairy Month special: half price ice cream sodas! They cost 12 cents! I usually had more than one that month.

My paper route

My first paper route on East Lakeview Ave was a relatively small one with only 34 subscribers. The street looks much the same today. The Citizen (and the Dispatch for that matter) cost 5¢ a copy daily and 15 cents on Sunday. Of that, we got, I think a little over 2 cents a paper, and probably a bit more for the Sunday paper. (I later learned that Dispatch carriers were paid a bit more, closer to 3 cents a paper.)

I folded all the papers, put them in my saddle bags and set off about 4 blocks south to Lakeview. Usually, I put some folded papers in my shoulder bag and walked up one side of the street and back down the other delivering papers. Most houses in this era had covered wooden porches, and if I could toss the paper on the porch, it was pretty safe from the elements. Some customers had specified “In the door,” ot “In box” and we had to walk up and deliver these in person.

Then I rode my bike up to the next block and repeated the process. The last part of Lakeview made a left turn and ran along the Walhalla ravine. These houses were below street level and a bit harder to get to. Sometimes this engendered small tips, but that was pretty rare.

Sometimes there were mishaps: you got a paper wet or accidentally tossed it into the bushes. But since I added my parents’ house to my route, I always had an extra. In one particularly wild mishap, a wild throw left a paper on the customer’s porch roof. Fortunately, that was Jim Lawson’s parents’ house, and we had a good laugh over it.

Delivering papers was pretty quick once you got the hang of it, but Sunday papers were a bit more of an effort. The papers were heavier and hard to manage, and most carriers, including me, talked their parents into driving them on Sundays. You picked up the papers, I think, between 6 and 7am and were expected to have them all delivered before 8am. And yes, on Sunday, I used rubber bands.

Collecting

Collecting from customers was one of the bigger pieces of drudgery in what at first seemed like a halcyon experience. Carriers were given half-size 3 ring notebooks with a page for each subscriber, and it was up to you to collect weekly and keep records of whether they had. Generally, we collected Thursday evening after dinner, when people would be home. Daily subscribers paid 30 cents a week, daily and Sunday paid 45 cents, and those who ordered magazine subscriptions through the Citizen paid an additional 15 cent a week. So, you collected 30, 45 or 60 cents per subscriber per week.

This took some time but wasn’t too hard. There were almost always a few you had to go back to because they didn’t seem to be home or didn’t want to answer the door, or didn’t have change. I had one of those belt change dispensers loaded with nickels, dimes and quarters. This is the same sort of changer that came up in the testimony of Anthony Ulasiewicz, one of Nixon’s White House Plumbers, who testified that he carried a changer to make all those phone calls from pay phones.

The second year, the Citizen came up with subscriber pages with little postage stamp sized tear-off tabs to give the subscribers as receipts. While this might have seemed like a good idea to someone, that meant there was little space to write notes about subscriber requests, and they weren’t all that sturdy.

Paying your bill

Every Saturday morning, a bunch of bleary eyed paper boys, carrying little canvas bags of money showed up at the substation to pay their paper bills. They didn’t want change or checks, so you had to have your parents launder the checks and If you had a bunch of coins, you eventually had to take them to the bank.

My bills that first year were around $11.50, meaning that I got to keep around $3 a week. Not really a big haul, but this was worth a bit more in the 1950s than it is now.

After about a year I got the chance to switch to a larger route on Clinton Heights, with about 56 subscribers. This took longer to deliver, but I made almost twice as much money, about $6 as week. And the route ended up only a block from our house. Clinton Heights had some larger houses, especially at the top of the street, but most wealthier people preferred the Dispatch.

Snow

Looking back at my childhood in Columbus, I tend to think of the smell of new-mown grass, fresh morning dew and hot summer days. But Columbus did have winters, and sometimes significant snowfalls. I don’t recall exactly all we did, but I do remember pushing my balloon tire bike through the snow as it carried the papers for me. I also remember that that little green carrier’s substation had a stove in it, and on cold afternoons and Saturday and Sunday mornings, Lawson would build a fire in that metal stove, vented through the roof. And that heat was really welcome.

Canvassing

One truly unwelcome feature of being paper carrier was the Citizen’s insistence on our canvassing for new subscribers. One night every month or so, we’d meet at the station about 6pm and jump into cars provided by Lawson and our district manager. They’d take us to unfamiliar neighborhoods and give us a pep talk about the wonderful trips we could win if we sold enough subscriptions (and magazines). The Dispatch did not require its carriers to canvas. But according to my friend Jeff Luce, who carried the Dispatch at the same time, they were required to sell accident insurance policies to their subscribers.

Some of the boys on these canvases came up with amusing, fictional trips instead such as rides on the Goodyear Blimp and alligator rides. Sometimes we went in pairs, egging each other on to enhance the fictions we were spinning. Sometimes, the customers found it entertaining enough to order a subscription.

Other times we were turned away because the Citizen was a “damned Democrat” newspaper. It certainly wasn’t as Republican as the Dispatch (in local argot pronounced DIS-patch) and it seemed more centrist to me. However, since Scripps Howard’s syndicate was wide ranging, some of the stories were probably less parochial. Later when I was back in Columbus for graduate school, I did compare the papers with a better eye to their politics, and as this was during the Vietnam war era, the differences were fairly plain. The Dispatch was far less forgiving in any stories about war protests and the Citizen much more neutral. Few of the nationally known liberal columnists appeared in either paper.

Selling Extras

In those simpler days, newspapers still sold extras on the street when a major story broke mid-day. I was called out of classes at Crestview to sell extras twice. The major one was the conviction on December 21, 1954 of neurosurgeon Dr Sam Sheppard in the murder of his wife Marilyn. I was given a bag of papers and a spot on North High street where I was to hawk the extras. I think I may have sold 6 or 7.

Sheppard was exonerated in a second trial and released from prison in 1966. The judge blamed the media circus atmosphere for influencing the jurors in the first trial. Columbus papers had stories nearly every day about “Dr Sam” and his sensational trial, but the Cleveland papers practically tried and convicted Sheppard in their articles. The television series The Fugitive seemed to be loosely based on Sheppard’s case, but this was always denied by its creators.

Carrier Awards

I did win one trip to Washington, DC with the newsboys when I was about 12, selling subscriptions. It was a really successful trip and we had a great time. We saw the usual sights: the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument and yes, I and most us did climb all 800-some steps to the top of the monument. We also saw Monticello, Arlington Cemetery, and I think, part of the Smithsonian.

I was selected a Carrier of the Year my last year in the job and took a bus down to the Citizen office and have my picture taken along with a handful of other lucky carriers. We got our pictures in the paper and a snow globe with a gold paper carrier in it, that sadly I seem to have lost some time since. In my 2-1/2 years as a paper boy, I had only one “missed” delivery, so I had a pretty good record, but it probably didn’t help me much with my college applications.

Time to Go

Partway through 9^th grade at Crestview Jr High, I realized that it was time to leave the paper business as North High School was approaching, and it would make more demands on my time. So, I submitted my resignation. And, in the place for a reason, my wise-guy parents suggested I put down a biblical reference: I Corinthians 13:11. The quote is:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

Sex

Like Peyton Place, no story would be complete without some sex. You would probably like to read about some flamboyant affair with a customer or wife or something, But I was 14 then and that never happened. The best story I can tell you is the Susie Scott lived on Clinton Heights and I saw her once or twice and took her out at least once. That was to go to a Teen Dance Party TV broadcast one Saturday afternoon. And yes, we did dance, so I can say this was my (our) TV debut as dancers: an event never repeated.

Epilog

The Isaly family retired in the 1960s and many of the beloved stores closed with them. The delicious Klondike Bars remain, now made by Unilever. Most of the Ohio Stores closed by the 1990s, and one or two remained longer in the Pittsburgh area.

The little green substation is gone now, and that space looks to be a parking lot. Isaly’s seems to have been replaced by a Kroger and, sadly, the elegant Clinton Theater, where I saw lots of kid’s matinees has been torn down. Right now, there is just a patch of grass there.

In 1959, Scripps Howard merged the Ohio State Journal with the Columbus Citizen and the Citizen-Journal was published as a morning paper under a Joint Operating Agreement with the Columbus Dispatch, using the same press facilities, and some of the same back office staff. This was possible because of a recent law that was intended to save struggling papers, and did for a while. But in 1985, recognizing that evening papers were passé, the Dispatch terminated the operating agreement and the Citizen-Journal, lacking a buyer, closed. The Dispatch became the morning paper the next day.

By the third generation, the children of the powerful Wolfe family were less interested in running the family businesses. In addition, the newspaper publishing business was no longer all that profitable and in 2015, the family sold the Columbus Dispatch to Gatehouse Media. In 2016, the new Dispatch owners endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, although Ohio went for Trump. This was only the second time the Dispatch had endorsed a Democrat. Their other endorsement was of Woodrow Wilson.

The family patriarch John F Wolfe died in June, 2016, and The Wigwam, the Wolfe family’s hunting lodge and retreat was sold to Violet Township in 2018 by the Wolfe family at a substantial discount from its valuation, bringing to an end some of the power of the Wolfe clan. They still owned broadcast media, substantial real estate holdings and investment banking businesses, but Wolfe’s philanthropic leadership and strong opinions were no more.