Kerfuffle

If you grew up in Chicago in the 50s or 60s, you'll remember these holiday cartoons... not to say it's a good memory, but still...

A few classics that were annual staples of the Garfield Goose children's program hosted by Frazier Thomas on WGN-TV.

We were easily entertained back then, when there were only five channels and one of the was them dreaded "educational channel."

I was given a brief glimpse of my first job when passing a campus bike rack today

It was just past noon, and I was heading from the communications building over to the Union for lunch.  Passing through the courtyard next to the humanities building, something in the bike rack caught my eye. 

Is that a Schwinn Collegiate?  Why yes it is.  And for what was likely a 40-year-old bicycle, it was in remarkably good shape.  The chrome fenders still shined and the rims were rust-free.  It appeared to have the original reflectors and color-matched seat.  And it had a pair of shiny metal baskets over the back wheel.  Save for being gold instead of green, it was exactly like the one I had when I was ten.

Yes, I was a dork who had a bike with big metal baskets.  The epitome of anti-cool.  And when the bike racks at school were crowded, it was had to fit into a space.  And while all the other kids had Schwinn Varsity bikes, the ten-sped with the drop handlebars, I had my five-speed Collegiate with baskets.  I needed that dorky version because I had a paper route.  On days like Mondays, Tuesdays and Saturdays when the Chicago Tribune was thinner, I could do my route in one load.  The baskets couldn't handle the bigger days' editions in a solo mission, and forget about Sunday.  But that bike with the dorky baskets was key to me having more spending money than my grade school friends.  

I remember that the bike weighed a ton compared to today's bikes.  Steel construction... solid and built to last (as was evident today).  A tank on two wheels.  That was back when Schwinn bikes were made in the USA and were by far the best known and most popular bicycle on the market. 

Schwinn is still around, sort of.  The company went through a bankruptcy or two and ultimately the brand was tossed into the Pacific Cycle portfolio.  Now made in China, the bikes are but one of many parity brands, and the once-powerful Schwinn dealer network is a shadow of its former self.  But they still make the Collegiate.  It sells for about $500. 

Having a job that paid real money in fifth grade... cool.  Five-speed bike with upright handlebars and big metal baskets... so not cool.  But it's a fun memory nonetheless.

"They give us those nice bright colors. They give us the greens of summers. Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, Oh yeah"

"What is Kodachrome?"

That would be my response on Jeopardy if the answer offered was, "The absolute best film to capture anything in true color and preserve it for all time."

My first real job was as a clerk at a camera store when I was 15.  I was already a camera nerd, developing and printing my own black and white film.  I messed around with slide film... usually Kodak's Ektachrome, because I had always heard it was more stable even though it had a sort of bluish bias.  But I also knew that, without exception, the best color saturation... provided you had a lot of light... was Kodachrome... especially Kodachrome 25.

 Even back then, in the 1970s, Kodachrome was special, in a class by itself.  It couldn;t be processed by just anyone.  Our little store shipped it from San Diego up to Kodak's lab in Palo Alto.  (I still have the yellow Kodak Palo Alto transfer bag I appropriated when I worked at RB Photo.) It took longer, but the results - even for an amateur - were worth the time and expense.

As recently as ten years ago, the instructors at The Nikon School, a traveling seminar for serious amateurs, talked about the value of shooting transparency film over print film, and that nothing delivered like Kodachrome.  The images perfectly captured a full range of color in the most stable of forms.

But Kodachrome's time was limited.  Digital photography was pretty much bringing a close to the multi-century history of capturing images on film. The ability to capture, manipulate, and print professional grade color was brought to the home market by camera makers along with manufacturers of digital hardware on flash memory media.  To be shooting with film was to be protecting the buggy whip franchise.  My Nikon N70 and N90 are now up on the shelf with my antique camera collection.  The D70 took over, and now I lust after the D90 and others.

Last month, Kodak announced that the last product in the Kodachrome line, Kodachrome 64, would no longer be manufactured.  Most camera nerds and professional photographers are accepting this as the inevitable, but it is still kind of sad.

Some are taking it better than others...

Jim Sugar, a Mill Valley advertising and commercial photographer, said it was about time.

"The world became a different place when the resolving power of digital cameras equaled or surpassed film," he said. "This was not a tragedy. This was a train wreck that we saw coming for 15 years. And by this point it wasn't even a train wreck, it was a fender bender."

But some fans are not ready to let go just yet.

John Game, a 62-year-old amateur botanical photographer in Berkeley, has used Kodachrome for more than 30 years because, in his view, nothing else would do.

Game still has eight Kodachrome rolls to go and is looking for more. He plans to use them as he tries to "gradually wean myself off of them."

"For my last roll I'll make a point of doing something symbolic, something special with it," he said. "It's been a wonderful film. It's like the end of an era in photography."  [San Francisco Chronicle]

Like everyone else reflecting on this passing of this artistic icon, I keep thinking of Paul Simon's song, and only now can truly appreciate and feel the sentiment in those closing lyrics.

"Mama don't take my Kodachrome away."

Too late.

The glamour, the schmoozing, the bloated budgets and all the other things that made working in advertising so much fun: Goodbye to all that

I recall telling my father, several years ago, that the advertising business just wasn't as much fun as it was when I started (in 1982).  Having had a very successful career in the same business himself, he laughed and replied, "You should have been around in the 60s."

Dad might have been correct, and episodes of Mad Men certainly reinforce his position.  Still, for people who have recently been working in the ad game, or like me have recently walked away from it, this video is bittersweet.  Funny, true, but also rather telling.

[h/t to one-time media guy turned adjunct professor guy Dan Binder for the link]

Looking for a small piece of my childhood: In search of the Manx Hotel

[San Francisco] When I was maybe nine years old, our we took what I think was our best family vacation.  My folks, brother, sister and I rode The Burlington's California Zephyr (this was pre-Amtrak) from Chicago to San Francisco.  We then drove down the coast all the way to San Diego before catching Santa Fe's Super Chief from Los Angeles back home. 

It was an incredible trip for many reasons.  One of the coolest reasons, to me anyhow, was that it was my first time ever staying in a real "city Hotel."  We had stayed in motels and motor lodges during other vacations, but this was right in downtown San Francisco... not that I could remember where.  It had bellhops and all these seemingly important people buzzing around.  It was called the Manx Hotel.

This afternoon, I set out to find the Manx.  It wasn't in any of the listings, so I assumed it was long gone -- at least the name was.  But was the building still around?  Was it still a hotel?  With a little Googling, I found some old postcards from the Manx Hotel, including one with an address:  Powell at O'Farrell.  That's within a mile of where we are staying.  Off I went.

From the old postcards, I recognized the building.  It as still there, and it was still a hotel.  We had passed the Villa Florence hotel on Saturday, but I hadn't realized it was the old Manx.  For confirmation, I went into the lobby.  While all redone, the basics were the same, right down to how the restaurant and front desk were positioned. 

I had to get confirmation.  The desk clerked smiled and said, "Yes, indeed, but that was a long, long time ago."  She told me other people at times asked about the Manx, especially old men who remembered it as the U.S. Navy's west coast headquarters during World War Two.

Next time we come out here, we have to stay at the Manx, umm, I mean the Villa Florence.