Rinker on Collectibles

RINKER ON COLLECTIBLES — Column #1748

The 2x2 35mm Slides Nightmare - Part 1

I met Bill Yoder during the Canal Society of New York’s summer 1966 Lehigh Canal field trip. He was in his mid-70s and just had returned from a rafting trip down the Colorado River. Bill and I became close friends while working together to build the collections and library of the Pennsylvania Canal Society and similar projects.

Bill’s life story had a Horatio Alger quality. After graduating from high school in Auburn, New York, Bill and a friend converted a boat and traveled east on the Erie Canal earning money to fund the trip by taking photographs of homes and people, printing the images on postcards, and selling them at the rate of 10 for a dollar. After Bill and his friend reached Schenectady, they sold the boat and went their separate ways. Bill walked to the nearby General Electric Plant and asked for a job. Initially, he worked with DeForest on the transatlantic telegraph radio. Later, he was part of the team that tested the lock mechanisms for the Panama Canal.

Bill was born before the age of flight and watched the live television broadcast of man’s first steps on the moon. Bill lived during the engineering/technical revolution of the last century of the Industrial Age. He remembered life before radio, television, and World War I and the wars that followed.

Over the years, I often reflected on whether I would be part of the same number of important lifestyle changes as those experienced by Bill Yoder. When I was younger, the answer was always negative. As I approach my 80s, my perspective has changed. I now have a greater appreciation for change and how it is accelerating rather than decreasing the older I become.

When I entered Lehigh University in the Fall of 1969, those students enrolled in the engineering program, of which I was one, were required to purchase a slide rule. We used it to calculate roots, powers, logarithms, and exponentials in addition to a host of other mathematical operations. In 1972, Hewlett Packard introduced its HP-35 pocket scientific calculator that could perform every mathematical function of a slide rule and more. In the 21st century, computers accomplish these tasks in milli-seconds.

I recently started to deal with my hoard of thousands of photographic images, a mixture of family images from multiple generations to images created for lectures, publications, and other business purposes. It is impossible to deal with images without considering the cameras and film used to create them.

My father owned a Kodak No. 2 folding bellows camera that used 120 black and white film. It is in my collection and still in its period box. My father was meticulous when it came to maintaining things. I have several files and boxes of black and white negative strips and envelopes of prints dating from the 1920s to the 1950s.

In the mid-1950s, my father purchased a Kodak Retina, fixed lens, 2x2 35mm slide camera. I carried it with me when I visited the Philmont Scout Ranch in Colfax County, New Mexico in 1955. The Retina marked a transition in my extended family between black and white photography and 2x2 35mm color slides.

Instead of thumbing through the pages of a photo album of a vacation trip, it became a family custom (or a not so subtle form of torture depending on one’s point of view) in the 1950s and 1960s to visit the home of an aunt or uncle to “enjoy” a social evening looking at the slides for a recent adventure.

The standard approach was to show every slide – good, bad, worse, and disastrous. Each came with a minute to five minutes of explanation. The “slide show” social evenings extended for hours.

When Uncle Earl and Aunt Peg Prosser traveled, Uncle Earl took two types of pictures—meals and flowers. It was only on the rarest occasions that a human being popped up in the background. An invitation to a slide show at Uncle Earl and Aunt Peg’s house was a means of understanding one’s rank and position in the Prosser family. If a family member was invited to dinner before the slide show, the person was in the best of graces. If invited to dessert, the participant felt honored but knew not to allow the honor to go to his/her head. If invited only to the slide show, my customary invitation, the attendee clearly was aware the he/she was tolerated as a courtesy and nothing more. Aunt Peg and Uncle Earl were part of a generation that had zero tolerance for any young person that questioned the authority of older adults, especially their own.

I began my professional career as the Director of Archival Research for Historic Bethlehem in June of 1966. In order to document objects and copy images, I purchased my first Nikon FN interchangeable lens camera. I copied old photographs for use in education lectures and research. When I visited Herrnhut, the Moravian headquarters in Communist East Germany in 1968, I carried the Nikon to document my travels and copy historical documents at the Moravian Archives on behalf of Historic Bethlehem and Old Salem.

Nikon cameras became an integral part of every job I had from Executive Director of the Hugh Moore Park to Executive Director of the Historical Society of York County. My personal collection of 35mm black and white images/negatives and 2x2 color slides documenting the American canals number in the tens of thousands.

My Nikon camera received heavy use during my ownership of Rinker Enterprises. Initially, I photographed all the images that appeared in the books I edited or wrote. Harry, Jr., my son, worked as a staff photographer for two years. I lost count of the number of 2x2 35mm color slides I took for lecture purposes. My best guess is the 35mm slide archives of Rinker Enterprises contained between 40,000 and 50,000 slides.

When I walk into one of the storage areas in my Kentwood, Michigan basement, I immediately encounter three stacks of archival file boxes and Kodak carousel slide trays filled with 2x2 35mm color slides. They divide into four distinct groups: (1) family slides from my mother and father and myself, (2) slides taken by friends that I saved because their heirs did not want them, (3) slides from the lectures I gave while teaching courses at my Institute for the Study of Antiques and Collectibles, and (4) favorite lectures on canals and other topic such as “Weird and Strange Collectibles” that are too important to discard.

When Hansmartin Hertlein, my brother in all things but blood, died in December 2018, I dug out several boxes and trays of 35mm 2x2 slides in search of slides of Hansmartin taken by my father or me. His son Marc asked me to forward the images to him for use in a presentation at Hansmartin’s memorial service.

Dumb me. I forgot times change. After I selected a dozen slides, I took them to a local drug store chain to have them scanned to a disc. When I could not find a method to do this in the photograph section, I asked a clerk for help. The clerk stared in disbelief. “We haven’t offered this service for years.” In desperation, I called several camera shops. Eventually, I found one that could scan the slides and create the disc. I still am shell shocked by the price.

Since that incident, I have not returned to the stacked boxes and trays of 35mm slides. I am well aware that if I do not make some constructive decisions on how to preserve at least some of them, my heirs are likely to solve the problem by simply trashing the entire collection based on the simple premise that they do not have the interest or willingness to take time to look at every slide.

Mentally, I have been working on a plan to tackle the slides and determine a productive future for some of them. Part II of this two-part series will describe my plan and how I will implement it. Hopefully, it will serve as a model for those facing a similar challenge.

Harry L. Rinker welcomes questions from readers about collectibles, those mass-produced items from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Selected letters will be answered in this column. Harry cannot provide personal answers. Photos and other material submitted cannot be returned. Send your questions to: Rinker on Collectibles, 5955 Mill Point Court SE, Kentwood, MI 49512. You also can e-mail your questions to harrylrinker@aol.com. Only e-mails containing a full name and mailing address will be considered.

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