A Thousand Words

More bad news today from Kodak.  As the company teeters on bankruptcy, Kodak announced they're exiting the camera business, a technology they innovated since the 1880s, along with photographic film.  There's no mention of today's news on A Thousand Words, a blog by and for Kodak employees. 


I remember my first camera, the Kodak Instamatic 104 with its Sylvania Blue Dot Flashcubes.  It was a gift from my parents, along with a dozen 126 film cartridges, as we embarked from Connecticut on a February 1967 school break to Washington, DC and Williamsburg, Virginia, which was a family rite of passage when you turned 10.  My older brother had turned 10 the summer before.

I just paged through my photo album from that trip. Lots of the kinds of pictures you'd imagine a nine year old would take . . . Washington Monument (crooked), House of Representatives (crooked in every sense of the word), the Lincoln Memorial, etc.  There was a whole page of snap shots of the magazine at Williamsburg, including one taken the moment the cannon fired.  That one's crooked too, and blurry. 

My other distinct memory of the trip was the fierce ice storm that befell New England and the mid-Atlantic states during our trip.  This storm was the backdrop of the 1960s marital and family distress in the Ang Lee movie The Ice Storm, filmed in New Canaan near my hometown.

Here's a cheerier depiction of that era.  It's new, it's now!  It's Flash Cube! Flash Cube?