An Old Job

 This is more a personal history today of my past life. When I was about 19, I took a job in the warehouse where my father worked in Detroit at Garrick Photo Supply.  This was a company that was the biggest supplier of photographic and processing equipment in Michigan in its day.  So those of you that have only taken pictures with your phone would know nothing about how photographs were made from the time of George Eastman till the advent of the digital camera.  There were smelly developer chemicals (which I can still remember), a darkroom where the acetate film was developed and a drum dryer that the paper photos were dried on after they came out of the development solution.  These guys sold all that stuff, the chemicals, the machinery and the photosensitive paper hat the images were printed on.  

Somehow as a student at Wayne State, I got a job there filling orders and unloading trucks from Eastman Kodak and others.  One anecdote I can recall with specific details is the unloading of the long van from Rochester NY,  the home of the famed manufacturer and camera maker.  Those of us old enough remember the "Brownie Camera" which was our initiation to taking pictures.  It was in fact brown and probably made from the precursor to plastic.  Back to the truck, In order to expedite the unloading process, the driver erected a set of wheeled rollers that looked like a ladder laying on its side on a steep decline.  The boxes would roll down the this conveyor at an increasing speed till the back of the trailer where we would catch them before they went sailing off.  This process was not problematic with lighter boxes.  However, always near the end, boxes of liquid developer were placed on the conveyor.  These small, cubes weighed 104 lbs and when they came down that chute it seemed like they were falling off a cliff.  It was a tough catch.

The firm was owned and operated by a father and his two sons.  Sam Garrick and sons Marvin and Harris.  At the point of my employment, the old man had little to do besides check waste baskets for merchandise that had been broken and discarded.  The sons ran the business which ultimately failed due to bad decisions and the changing times.    Eddie, my father sold and installed some of the development equipment from Pako Corporation of Minneapolis.  He had a company car that had placard in the station wagon window that said Pako Partsmobile. I do remember that car in some detail. It was a 1961 blue Chevy wagon that we took on vacations with us kids rolling around the back of the wagon, pre seat belts.  Part of my dad's reputation was that he did not leave the site until the machine was running.  He took great pride in that fact.

I found this picture in old archives from Detroit.  This old story just came up in my head.  

It's raining today, we need it.

all for now

stay safe