Old Negatives

Oodles.

The Kansas Woman dumped a shoe box of things on the table and started picking through it.

She expected pictures of her high school era, and there were some, but also hundreds of negatives.

She thought they were useless since everything is digital today. Long ago I found color slides and century aged family negatives. I wanted prints at least.

I bought a gizmo that facilitates converting negative into digital images. The images filled up a digital picture frame, and there might be another dedicated to these negatives.

For her class of Washington County High School, there was an event called “Senior Sneak.” It was supposed to be a secret from family and the community, sort of a group hooky day.

Big Secret! Every senior class in anybody’s memory did a sneak. An open secret, maybe?

Some adults or faculty were complicit. An adult had to charter the bus, pick the destination and make reservations.

She said that even the seniors didn’t know their destination. They were only told what sort of clothes to bring.

It was somewhere in Oklahoma. On a lake.

There are images of her senior prom, family members on Christmas of 1953. Horses, her brothers.

Quality is decent. Negative images are about 2 x 2 inches, but pictures were shot through a plastic lens that might not have been cleaned recently. There was one odd film format, like 2 x 1 inch and plain old 35mm film used when few amateurs used 35mm.

I know some of the folks in the pictures. They were younger, skinnier, with smoother, unlined faces, untested by life, hearts yet to be broken.

The film jackets were from processing labs in Wisconsin and Missouri.

A twelve exposure roll was developed and printed for sixty cents per roll and forty-five cents for eight exposure rolls. That price was for three inch prints, but jumbo reprints cost a nickel each.

Prints included a date on the edge and that helped. For photographers using 35mm film, the 20 exposure roll was one dollar and the 36 exposure roll was $1.75. This was when a bottle of soda, or what they call “pop,” was a nickel.

These prices were from Fo-Jo photo lab in De Soto, Missouri.

I wondered what happened to the Fo-Jo processing business.

Well, they’re still in business, or least there is a professional photographer working under the same name in De Soto.

While the name has stayed the same, I’ll bet the prices have changed. The cost of mailing negatives, prints and all was 4.5 cents.

joenphillips@yahoo.com