February 1, 2012
Pillars Of Youth
The recent announcement by Hostess Brands that they’d filed for bankruptcy was a double-edged sword in our family. Alas, on the block are Twinkies, Devil Dogs, Hostess Cupcakes, Ding Dongs, Donettes, those pink sno balls – a whole roster of what was essentially sugar and butter baked into flour. And of course no mention of Hostess would be complete without highlighting the giant flagship: Wonder Bread.
Wonder Bread Builds Strong Bodies Eight Ways. We grew up on that tag. We grew up on that bread.
Years ago when I was in eighth grade at St. Joseph’s School a couple of my friends and I would meet after school on the steps of a family-owned neighborhood grocery store. The store was owned by the parents of one of the friends, and while our primary purpose was to sit there and fold our newspapers prior to going out on our paper routes, our real purpose was culinary and involved a big bottle of Coke and a Hostess creation from the family store.
I was particularly fond of a spice cake they made, but a package of Twinkies or Devil Dogs was always a fine substitute. Given our thoughts today about kids and such snacks I’m surprised the packaging doesn’t carry a black box warning about hyperglycemia (hey, we got our papers delivered fast!) or instant diabetes.
When my kids were growing up in Pennsylvania they had a similar relationship with Drakes Cakes. Nostalgia is not to be taken lightly. Today, as full-grown adults living in the Midwest, they have been known to go online to the Drake site and place an order. My double-edged sword? I don’t think my kids know that Drakes Cakes is owned by Hostess. So it’s all on the line.
Just this week as I was mulling over the Hostess Brands struggle I was taken aback by an announcement of at least equal – though I would maintain far greater – import: Kodak has now filed for bankruptcy.
I’m beginning to feel as though two giant pillars of my youth are about to crumble. Kodak, for me, was a good bit more than just hauling out the Brownie and taking some snapshots at a picnic or holiday gathering.
At a time in my life when my life was a little raggedy I was offered a job as a photographer at a local newspaper. For a couple of years I shot roll after roll of Kodak roll film and box after box of Kodak sheet film. I processed those films in Kodak chemicals and printed the pictures on Kodak paper. While my cameras were German or Japanese, my output (my living) was all Kodak.
The announcement of Kodak’s bankruptcy filing did not come as a complete surprise. I’ve noticed, without thinking much about it, the strange phenomenon in the camera section of a local drugstore. Used to be it took a good six-foot breadth of shelving to hold all the varieties of film: Kodachrome, Ektachrome, Tri-X, Plus-X. There was always some room for that renegade competitor Fuji, but Kodak essentially owned those displays. Gradually did that shelving shrink – down to nothing.
While filing for bankruptcy need mean nothing more than that a company is trying to get out from under some bad decisions, those stories, these days, rarely seem to have happy endings.
As we follow the First Lady’s lead and try to upgrade our nutritional habits both for ourselves and our kids, it seems clear that the salt and sugar industries will be taking it on the chin. Sweet nostalgia may be less sweet in the future and I can accept that. But with Kodak my judgment is harsh.
Kodak, of course, failed to hop on the digital train at the outset and discovered it’s hard to steer the train from the caboose. It’s just so easy to imagine the scenarios, the meetings, the conferences at corporate headquarters in Rochester, New York. One hears the voices and senses the frustrations of both young and old forward-thinking staff as they tried to push this new “digital thing,” only to be met by the brick wall of tradition. Of course I don’t know that it happened that way, but it’s difficult to understand how a company that was photography could one day find itself disastrously out of the mainstream.
Wow. Next thing you know someone is going to say Sears is in trouble.
G. K. Wuori © 2012
Photoillustration by the author
