Back then, if you were on a budget or wanted to experiment, you assembled a 35mm darkroom to load film into canisters for liquid development. Kevin described his discovery of darkroom magic here along with pictures of his old darkroom. You would select a negative to project onto photo paper which you dunked into three trays of liquid developers. Today, every digital picture is immediately processed and visible. Back then, you would only shoot some of your opportunities because you only loaded thirty-six shot rolls of film into the camera. You might miss a shot while reloading, or conserve your shots so you didn’t run out of the pack of film you brought that day. In the end, you had lots of negatives and prints. Because your camera’s exposure, shutter speed, and focus were manual, a good percentage of your shots might end up out of focus, blurred, or over or under-exposed. This meant there were pictures on each roll you wouldn’t want to print, but you were squinting at the small images in negative print to decide. So, you’d pick a few good ones to enlarge onto paper and process as a print and then reenlarge and print again to crop. Kevin was prolific and his desk drawers were overflowing with them. Our generation lived through the death of film to personal computer repositories of electronic images that are computer focused and auto-exposed.

Kevin and I also loved the movies and would go to many with anyone who  would come along. We’d usually brainstorm a rewrite of the endings since we always thought we could do better. This was a constant topic of conversation on movie nights, perhaps not so entertaining for our dates. I’ve come to mourn the twilight of the Hollywood age since, and especially when I peruse those releases of 1970-1972. Such a breadth and depth of moviemaking we experienced together! This was somewhat the end of the era of World War II films and the time also included cultural, western, and silly films like Planet of the Apes, Love Story, Dirty Harry, Fiddler on the Roof, James Bond, The French Connection, A Clockwork Orange, Harold and Maude, Straw Dogs, Cabaret, and The Godfather. There was never a shortage of laughter, philosophy, social critique, and science fiction to expand our developing minds.

He was a friend who brought energy to dreams. This connected him to newspaper communities, firehouse communities, and yearbook teams. He embraced these places that I only visited. I went on to work as a church janitor and a Rexalls handiman, while Kevin led the good life shooting weddings, fires, and experimenting with being a newspaper photojournalist. His first regular gig was probably at the local Suburban & Wayne Times newspaper. I think they gave him a press pass, but not too many assignments. Instead, he seemed to operate more as a free-lance photographer and he eventually focused on covering fires. He got a fire band scanner to find out where fires were located and would go shoot the action as the firehouse responded. Then, I assume he sold the good ones to the Suburban to fund his camera purchases. If we were out and about, or just crashing at one of our houses and if the scanner went off, we were likely jumping in the car to cover it. 

I tended to find house fires particularly saddening, but I had not become one of the brotherhood of firefighters who likely felt they could sometimes put an end to such destruction.  There were two fires that had become stuck in our shared past.

 The truck’s low back bumper was conveniently depressing the chest-high. prickers down to thigh-high - great for us! They couldn’t give us a ride, of course - policies! We followed along on foot taking advantage of the bent-over prickers just behind the truck. We had to high-step/jump along like kangaroos carrying cameras to avoid the prickers. We were fuel for the firemen’s jokes! If we fell behind, we’d get whipped in the chest, so we’d quickly close the distance again to avoid the pain. We took our pictures and then were stranded and had to slowly pick our way back, stopping every few steps to disengage from the prickers. Returning to the car took forever. We resolved that nature fires were no longer worth pursuing. This adventure became known to the two of us as the “Famous Pricker Farm Fire” and was mentioned every chance we could get as an inside reference to describe any other ridiculous effort where you would probably look like a clown and not care.

Our Radnor High School physics teacher was the Fire Chief and we were on good terms, except once. There was one of those cheap chain steak houses in town, Sizzler, perhaps. One day the kitchen caught fire and we heard it on the radio and went over to take a look and some pictures. It was mostly smoke, so the firemen set up their super large exhaust fans to blow it out. After we snapped some smokey shots from a distance, we moved closer and shot some through the windows and empty doorways of the interior. Everything was winding down, except at the silverware kiosk. The large fans had taken to peeling off the top napkin from the twelve stacks of 80 napkins set up for customers. Twelve napkins at a time were fluttering around the lobby every 10 seconds. For us, it seemed like a fire hazard,  made a mess, and a waste of napkins, so we ducked in and quickly put a knife on each of the nine piles. Problem solved! Except the next day, at the firehouse, Mr. Wood invited us into his office for a talking to. Never were we to enter a building under fire department control again! Of course we had violated the rules! We promised to be better and off we went.

Finally, Kevin couldn’t stand it any longer and he had to evolve into becoming a volunteer fireman in Wayne, so then when he responded, it was not as a reporter, but as a fireman. It was also a brotherhood that he loved and was rightfully  proud of. This gave him license to mount, first a Starsky and Hutch-style flashing light he could reach out and snap onto the roof while driving to respond to a call. Later, he bought a Ford Econoline van and installed a roof-rack type bar with two large blue flashing fireman lights on it. 

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Because we were around the Suburban and Wayne Times newspaper office, I got a job helping run the printing presses. 

Kevin and I had taken printing in high school shop class, where we assembled a page using individual lead single letters into a block, then hand-feeding small sheets into the press. For the newspaper, they were printing two pages each pass!  To eliminate the paper cut and paste page layout process and install a fancy new machine required a lot of floor space. Kevin and I were hired to go down in the unused basement and remove all the antique equipment, and the furniture and the ceilings and walls to get ready for remodeling. We spent probably two weeks sweating down there with sledge hammers knocking down plaster and dislodging the iron radiators that were attached to the ceiling, all crashing to the floor in a cloud of dust. This is the kind of OSHA-violating dirty work with no protection that would make you happy to pursue a professional job. We looked like coal-dust miners at the end of those days.