A Kodak Moment

                                     History as a Kodak Moment

           I was leafing through a volume of historical photos, published by the Buffalo News. They were snapshots  of Buffalo, N.Y from the 1920’s through the 1960’s. My sister-in- law, Trish Watson, had come across the volume and sent it to me as a keepsake. 

         Viewing pictures of the past is like looking through a temporal filter, peering through  the lens of a mystical camera on a world that once was. Fresh young faces, most now departed from this earthen coil, stare up at you with beatific smiles, at the moment of a wedding, graduation or holiday event. Most of us from working class families had a sparse amount of such pictures. One nephew asked plaintively “why?” I gently had to remind him that as late as the 1950’s, most families didn’t own cameras. The cost of the camera, the added cost of flash bulbs and then the film processing costs were usually beyond the budgetary limits of most working-class families. As a result, most of the people, that I knew and grew up with, don’t usually make the roster of photo albums like this one. It was always thus, here and in all of the many countries that we all emigrated from.

           The development of cameras has been a revolution in memories and the recording of history. We don’t need flash bulbs any more, nor do we use costly developers. The first Kodak instant camera seemed like magic. Pics were captured and developed almost immediately. And then, with the arrival of digital cameras, a new age has begun. “Selfies” from inexpensive digital cameras are everywhere. Every family and recreational experience, from all parts of the globe, appear instantaneously on the magic forum of the internet. You can frame a pic of a castle in Europe and have it up-linked for viewing by family on the internet in seconds. Photo albums of the future will be much changed from the one I recently viewed. And the historical record will be both changed and enlivened for descendants and historians, many years from now.

         Though the pictures featured in the album are static poses, the details surrounding all of them tell a story of a life and times now long past. In that I had only arrived on this planet in 1949, many of the structures shown have been demolished. Newer buildings had been constructed on their foundations. Life, like time, marches on. 

           Some of the pics from the 1960’s resonated with me. Famed Buffalo Bills Quarterback, Jack Kemp, had gone on to become a twelve- term Congressman from Buffalo. One of his wide receivers, Eddie Rutkowski had become Erie County Executive. Pics of Mayor Frank Sedita and City Common Council President Delmar Mitchell are of contemporaries of mine.

       Many of the photos, of Business Executives and personages long past, had me wondering, “Who are They?” Like wall hangings in dozens of castles we have visited, they represent a “who’s who” of their times.  Now, they are just fading pictures from long ago.

         There weren’t many automobiles in those early years of the twentieth century. The streets were much less peopled then. Horse and buggy rigs drifted up and down the main drags. Street cars made their entry in the 1920’s, just before the newly made cars filled the oldish avenues. Buffalo had been an economic and industrial power house from the late 1880’s through the late 1960’s. Its position, as the terminus of great lakes freight shipment from the west, meant that a river of commerce flowed through Western New York. This commercial rush had started with the Erie Canal and flowed on through the 1880’s.  Pioneers in the new automotive and airplane industries, those factories hummed with commerce through WW II.

         The economic decline for Buffalo started with the construction of the Welland Canal, transiting from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario. Ships could now bypass Buffalo for freight handling and processing. Then, the grand development of the Saint Lawrence Seaway, by both the  U.S. and Canada in the 1950’s, had begun the fateful tolling of what was to come. Ore, grain, beef and the commerce of the entire Midwestern United States could now flow uninterrupted from the Mesabi ore range in Northern Minnesota to the Atlantic Ocean. The heavy metals industry still prospered in Buffalo until the mid 1970’s, when that too collapsed in Buffalo and most of the United States. Newer Steel Plants in Japan, Germany and South Korea, many of which had been financed by American interests were the culprits. They made better and cheaper steel than we could. Some 35,000 good paying jobs evaporated in Buffalo, seemingly over-night.

         The photos capture the slow decline. Those celebrating their life’s events could not see what was to come. Like happy citizens in idyllic pictures of Germany and Japan, before the Second World War II, they could not possibly imagine the economic devastation of what was to come. The iconic architectural remains of many classic structures still survive in Buffalo/ Like remnants of the Pyramids and other palaces around the world, they are temporal reminder of the grandeur that once was.

           Buffalo has begun the long climb back up the economic ladder. Medical research, back-office banking and other newer and hi-tech industries have replaced what was. The much smaller City of Buffalo has made the turn into the twenty first Century. It will be of great interest to see the pics from the 1970’s through the first two decades of the new century in later photo albums. I wonder if paisley and psychedelic images photograph well?

         In that my grand-parents were born in Buffalo in 1882, I am a one person removed account view of our History, from the Civil War to the present. I can only imagine what those long-ago relatives would have thought when they saw America actually land men on the moon.

          A picture is worth a thousand words, some say. Yes, and they inspire a thousand more memories as well.

                                      -30-

                                  (1,004 words)

                            Joseph Xavier Martin