Ah, memories of the camera business...
On Sun, Sep 20, 1998 at 10:04:16AM -0700, John Robison wrote:
> They closed in June 1975 when Ralph Altman and his wife
> just got tired of the whole rat-race.
My parents owned a camera store right after that (1975-78). They also got
tired of the whole thing, especially of losing money to the big mail-order
houses, selling cameras to folks who came in to the store to pick a camera.
Mom's most vivid memory of that was one customer who came in to pick up some
processing that had been there for a while just before they closed down, and
complained bitterly about the quality. She finally got so mad she tore the
prints in half and told the customer to keep his money.
(Any of you from Houston remember BJ's Camera Store?)
> I spent an interesting morning counting five drawers of
> Alpa accessories. Cheeeeeez! There must have been
> twenty-thousand-1974-dollars-worth of stuff just in those five
> drawers!
What is it about Alpas, anyway? To me, they seem big and old and clunky:
everything OMs are not.
> This was the golden age of SLR's; the OM's, the FTB's, the SRT-101's,
> Nikons and Pentax were all lovely mechanical marvels that felt *good*
> just to hold and operate.
Amen. Too bad nobody can make an affordable piece of machinery these days.
As with you, though, the OMs were a league apart for me because of their
size and handling. Quiet, too: after running film through an SRT-101 for a
year, the OM was nearly inaudible. :-)
> Well, guess I've rambled on long enough . . .
Me too.
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