The Last Days of Kodachrome

And we returned to our American Stories. The oldest surviving photograph in the world was taken in eighteen twenty six. For reference, that’s when John Quincy Adams was president, who coincidentally is also the first president to be photographed. So needless to say, photography has been an industry for a very long time. Our next story is about a family involved in that industry. He was our own Monty Montgomery with the story.

Our story begins in Joplin, Missouri, the hometown of Joshua and Derek Carter, the grandsons of Dwayne Steinley. But they had another name for him.

We called him Bob Ob. That was kind of his grandpa name that we called him. So we were always always saying Bob Ob and stuff like that.

And Josh and I are very, very close to our grandfather, partly because so we have a sister that’s eight years younger than me and ten.

Years younger than Josh. And when.

Our mother was pregnant with our sister. She was on bed rest and was not doing very well for many, many months. And so that’s actually, at that point, is when my grandfather semi-retired from the business to come over to Joplin, and before it had always been, you know, kind of a treat of getting to go and spend the weekend at our grandparents, and then getting to spend every day for a year with our grandfather was just.

So much fun.

He lived with us and took care of us and took us to school, and we spent all day every day with our grandfather.

And our grandfather was a very curious person.

He liked to learn and was always interested in finding out about new things. He traveled all over the world, all over the country, learning anything that interested him. That was something that he always was very good with us about as well. He would take us as little boys, and we would just drive all over the place, and he’d take us into shops or he’d take us to, I believe we went to.

A power plant. A powerful one that I remember. We were driving through the field, and I remember I was probably six or seven years old, and I asked him, I said, “Well, you know, what is that massive thing out there is just outside of Pittsburgh, Kansas?” And he said, “Well, that’s a power plan. Do you want to go find out how it works?” And I said, “Well, sure.” And he pulls up to the front gate of the power plant, and I was six and Josh was probably eight, and he says, “Well, I’ve got my boys back here and they want to learn how the power plant works. Can someone give us a tour?” And the front gate guy said, “Well, I suppose,” and they called the manager of the power plant down, and we got a two-hour tour of the power.

Plant. Three, nine to eleven, world. So, yeah, that’s kind of how he was, of, you know.

He always wanted to find out how something worked or what was going on.

And our grandfather first got interested in photography when he was in high school. He started out doing wedding photography and shooting children.

And things like that.

That’s what he spent summers doing, saving up money to buy more photography equipment.

And he never really.

Thought that he was gonna be a photographer as his profession.

It was a hobby.

It was something that he thought that he’d go on and get some other type of a business job or some other type of a career. But he really enjoyed photography all the time, as soon as he started shooting in high school.

He did college, and then before he graduated college, she was drafted for the Korean War, and so he went to Korea. He actually arrived in Korea just as the war was coming to an end, and he was a crystal grinder for the radio, but he also did photography while he was there. And he was also kind of a practical jokester, and so the guys would play pranks on each other. And one of the stories he told us was the radar technicians would shoot the radar at him as he was walking across with his bag of flashbulbs, and he would buzz it, light would shine, and all.

His flash bulbs would go off all at once.

And so that was always a fun story that he would tell of his time in Korea getting zapped with the radar so that all his flash bulbs would go off.

He kind of developed somewhat of a reputation in Korea as a jokester, as Josh said. And some of the officers came in and wanted to play a joke on some of the one of the higher ranking officers, and so they got our grandfather to go and take a picture of the officer, and then he went and took a different picture of the latrine and superimposed it when, during the developing process, and the officers gave it to the higher ranking officer as a joke towards the end. But the higher officer was so impressed by it. He thought it was a great joke, and he actually got my grandfather a job to go and take photos of the whole fleet as they were leaving because he was impressed with his photography skills. When he returned from Korea, he got his degree in math and business. And he had a good friend who was in the Navy, and they had both just gotten out around the same time, and so one of the things that they really enjoyed from their travels was pizza, and there were no pizza places in Southeast Kansas at that time, and so they decided to go in together and open the first pizza place in Parsons. It didn’t do very well, and he kind of sat down and reevaluated what he wanted to do and what kind of a business, and he said, “Well, I always loved photography; maybe I need to do something with photography.” And so he became a salesman for film, actually, and he would go to Wichita and Kansas City and Tulsen by wholesale film and come back and sell it.

To drugstores in the local area.

He did that for two or three years, really, and he realized that a lot of the drugstores that he was selling in were sending all the developing off to Tulsa, Kansas City, or Wichita to have it done because there weren’t anyone doing the developing.

There were no labs in this area.

And he said, “Well, I’ve got a lot of experience in the darkroom of doing developing,” and so my grandfather he kept selling film during the day, and then at night he offered an overnight developing service, just a one-man kind of shop that he’d spend all night in the darkroom developing everyone’s film so that it could be ready.

For the next morning.

It was a very slow process to begin.

But Dwayne quickly made a name for himself in the photo processing industry because of his innovative strategies and fast pace of work.

He had photo huts, so little kiosks all over the region where people could drop off their film, and it would all get processed and then sent back out to the huts, and so that was a very successful endeavor for him in the late seventies. Our mom tells us a funny story, too, about something you might not think about, but game.

Film football games.

They would film it all, and all the coaches in the whole area would be out in our front lobby, all sitting next to each other after they just had a big game against each other the night before to pick up all their game film. And so we offered an overnight service to get all the game film ready so they could go and watch it the next day.

I think one of the next big things that really launched the business.

I think it’s, it’s always been told, is the.

Great Disc Film Debacle of nineteen eighty three.

For those who might not know or don’t remember, disc film was film, as the name suggests, wrapped around a plastic disc inside a camera. The photos were low-quality, and they were harder to process than normal film, but that did not mean people didn’t use them. Is Dwayne’s Photo was about to find out.

A major retailer offered a major special for Christmas in nineteen eighty three, and that was eighty percent off of disc film processing, and it was guaranteed that you have your disc processed and return to you by Christmas. And they did this only about a week and a half or two weeks before Christmas, and they didn’t think it was going to be a big thing because disc film was not popular at all at that point, and so they thought, “We just need to get rid of all.”

This disc film.

It turned out that it had exploded, and they had several tractor-trailers full of disc film that needed to get processed, and so there was a lab down in Arkansas that just could not handle it. And so they started calling all of the other photo labs within a two-hundred-mile radius saying, “Can you help us?”

Can you help us?

And no one everyone turned it away and said, “We have no interest in wanting to process that much disc film, especially a week before Christmas.” And my grandfather said, “Send us all the trucks and we’ll figure it out.” And they worked all through the day and all through the night for about ten straight days and got all of this disc film processed by Christmas. And it kind of being able to accomplish that and veeared him so much to some of these major national retailers that ever since that point, he started getting a lot more work in contracts from some of the major national retailers because he had made kind of this name for himself right before Christmas in nineteen eighty three.

And then through the two thousands.

We were one of the largest and ultimately the last Kodachrome lab.

And you’ve been listening to Joshua and Derek Carter tell the story of their grandfather, and it’s a story about so much more. It’s a story about innovation; it’s a story about change. I mean, how many people even remember the Photomats, those little huts all over the country where you ran film to? There is a renaissance of film and old-school developing. It is not how most of us process our photographs anymore. It’s instantaneous. It’s on our phones, and we text them along. When we come back, the story of the last days of Kodachrome here on our American Stories. And we’re back with our American Stories and the story of Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas. When we last left off, Joshua and Derek Carter, the grandsons of Dwayne Steinley, the founder of Dwayne’s Photo, were telling the story of how their grandfather came from the Korean War, tried his hand at pizza making, and ultimately ended up doing what he loved for his career. And that is, of course, all things having to do with photography. Eventually they would become the last Kodachrome lab in the United States. Let’s continue with the story.

In the early two thousands, as digital was starting to take over, the film was in decline, and so.

We were ultimately the last Kodachrome lab.

Kodachrome, released in nineteen thirty five by the Kodak Corporation, was the first real excess in color photography, and it was a huge deal in the film industry, but processing it was a bit of a hassle.

Kodachrome has a very, very complex and difficult to manufacture chemical formulation. The reason why Kodachrome was so popular is it had extremely vibrant colors, but you only got those extremely vibrant colors because of this very, very intense and very difficult process to produce it. So, due to both EPA regulations as well as just manufacturing costs, Kodak decided in the late two thousands that it was not going to be effective to continue producing it, and so they also did not feel like it was going to be a good investment to find new chemicals that.

Would be able to continue the production.

The news got out six, eight months ahead of time that, come into twenty ten, there would be no more Kodachrome processing, and by that point, we were already the very last lab in the entire world that was processing Kodachrome. So those last six months were, it was a really just crazy time for the company. People were showing up from other countries with thousands of rolls in boxes, begging to make sure that theirs got in before the last one was processing, before the chemicals ran out on it. By the very end of it in twenty ten, when it finally stopped, National News was broadcasting from the parking lot, and people were camped out in the backfield.

And it was a crazy event, really.

So in twenty seventeen, a bunch of film folks knew this story and decided to make a movie about it, and so that movie is called Kodachrome. And this movie has now made it onto Netflix, and people are seeing it, and so we’re having resurgence of people sending film.

Again as well.

Something else we’ve seen since Kodachrome, too, a lot of folks have been making, I guess you could call it, a pilgrimage to Parsons to drop their film off. Personally, we’ll have a group once or twice a week that comes in, and they’ll come in from each side of the country say, “Oh, I just drove here, you know, did fourteen hours in the car to drop this film off, and I just wanted to see the place and see where it all happened.” So we’ll give them a tour and let them see everything that goes on in a lab.

An interesting side-note, Joshua and Derek weren’t full-time employees of their grandfather’s business during the whole Kodachrome fiasco. So how did they end up there and why?

So I was working for a large national consulting firm actually doing business turnarounds.

And I was working at a law firm in Joplin.

In twenty eighteen, my grandfather had asked me to come in and look at some different options of how can we grow the company or how can we get more of a presence online because, in a lot of ways, the company was still kind of operating in nineteen ninety nine. So in twenty eighteen is when Derek and I were really starting to look at the company and see what the options were with it.

And he was actually running the business full-time up until the day he died. It was looking like the business might finally close after sixty years, and he did not want that to happen, and we took over and kind of started our journey here.

So I’m twenty.

Seven, I’m thirty.

So we went through a pretty long process when we first got here of trying to learn it. You know, we had knowledge about film and cameras and things growing up just being in this family. It’s kind of hard not to learn a lot of things or pick it up from our grandfather. But in terms of actual the film processing things, there was a very steep learning curve for us when we first got here, and that’s something that there’s a lot of folks who have been here twenty, twenty-five, thirty years, have made their whole career, and we’re very good about, you know, really being experts in the industry, and so some that we’ve learned a lot from them. But then, all also, you know, we found a number of things. Our grandfather really wanted to make sure that a lot of this info was passed down, and when I was first going through his office and his desk and things, one of the most helpful things is he actually wrote in the late nineteen eighties a guide to photofinishing that had all the notes for the lab of everything you need to remember and everything that you need to do to be able to have everything running in the building really well. And we found, we continue to find a lot of those things. So, you know, we pour over as much of that information here as we possibly can to make sure that we really kind of become experts in this field because we don’t necessarily we’re not brought up in it, you know, and when it was in its heyday in the in the eighties and nineties, but then also there’s been a huge resurgence in film amongst younger people. It’s much like the resurgence and vinyl records for us going and trying to deal with ever-increasing volumes of film now. It has been probably the biggest challenge for us is being able to use equipment designed decades and decades ago, and so we’ve had to also try and get creative with how we’re doing it. Looking at, we’ve got a three-D printer in the back for printing up gears and different parts and things. And then we’re always looking for people who can help us. And it’s amazing a lot of these people either knew or knew of our grandfather, and we’ll call them because we see that, “Hey, you used to work in the industry, or, you know, you make a part that could be used,” and they say, “Oh, I remember selling that to your grandfather in nineteen eighty five.”

“I’d love to help you.”

And a lot of people have come out of retirement specifically to help us and to help get things back going.

We’re still reaping the benefits of the relationships that our grandfather made three decades ago.

We’ve also learned a lot more about our grandfather from being in this business and talking to people who knew him in a different way from how we knew him, and those stories have been some of the most interesting. We were talking to the hea.