I could hear the camera whispering to me in a German accent heavy with sauerkraut and bratwurst.
“Buy me,” it said. “Buy me. You know you should.”
And so I did, and here’s the story of how that came to pass.
Last week, Wilma Newby texted me some photos of old darkroom equipment at a newspaper she was visiting.
Wilma is a road warrior who travels the state to work on computers and networks for the 170-something members of the Oklahoma Press Association, and I’d asked her to let me know if she happened onto anyone who still had a working enlarger for making black and white prints.
Wilma knows of my addiction to old cameras and gear and she hooks me up from time to time.
There was an enlarger in the photos she sent, so I called the paper, which is owned by a friend of mine, and enquired about it.
While we were talking, I could hear Wilma in the background.
“And she has a Brownie, too. No. Wait. It’s a Rolodex.”
“Do you mean Rolleiflex?” “Yes! That’s it.” Suddenly, I was far less interested in the enlarger and asked Wilma if she could send photos of the Rollei.
Rolleiflex might not mean much if you don’t like old cameras, but they are to film photography what Martins are to guitars and what Pontiac GTOs are to muscle cars. They’re the example that defines the type.
Rolleiflexes were twin-lens cameras made in Germany starting in 1929. They quickly developed a reputation for highest-quality optics and tough German engineering.
I have a special fondness for twin lens cameras because that’s what I used as a cub reporter for the Ada Evening News in the late 1970s.
We used Yashicas, which were a knock-off of the Rolleiflex. By then, 35mm SLRs had become the most popular cameras, but I liked the twin lens models because they were quirky enough to be cool and they produced terrific pictures.
Through the years, I have acquired 20-something twin lens cameras and have been on a personal quest to find one that entered the world about the same time I did: October, 1952.
So far, the closest I’ve come was a Zeiss Ikoflex made in November, 1951. At least that’s the date that was written inside it, and the serial number on the lens roughly matches that date.
It’s a wonderful camera and I used it to take a 20by-30 photo of Kindra that hangs on the wall here at the newspaper.
I was hoping the Rollei might be a little closer. The serial number on the body shows it was stamped in August 1951 and the number on the lens dates to about the middle of December.
Who knows? Since the lens was made by Zeiss in Oberkochen, W. Germany, and had to be shipped to Rollei, maybe they were actually assembled into the final camera and sent off the production line in early 1952.
Even if not, it would still be the closest camera I‘d have to my birth date, so I drove to the newspaper the next day to look at it.
It was in good condition for a 70-year-old camera, but the shutter hadn’t been tripped since probably the Kennedy Administration and was locked up tighter than a bank vault.
So, I paid more for it than I should have for one that old that didn’t work, but I brought it home and shipped it off the next day to a repair guy who has fixed three other cameras for me.
I’m still waiting to hear back what it will cost, but it will be worth it to have a classic camera that dates to within a year of my entry into the world.
Now, if I can just find a ‘52 Chevy that still runs, I’ll be ready to take Kindra on a photo road trip and show her what life was all about in 1952.