As politicians and the public debate the merits of sending military aid to Ukraine, I have the fortunate timing to be reading about a surprisingly similar situation that occurred more than 80 years ago.
And then Joy May stopped by the office.
I wrote that first paragraph on Friday afternoon, as I started a column comparing today’s debate over American military aid to Ukraine with the America First opposition in 1940 and 1941 to U.S. involvement in Europe’s latest war.
The 1940s stuff is on my mind because I have been reading a biography of Charles Lindbergh, who from 1927, when he became the first pilot to fly from New York City to Paris, to 1941 had to be the most famous American in the world. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was his only competition for that title.
But when Joy arrived, she brought a better column idea with her.
She delivered a pecan pie in gratitude for letting her borrow a sleeve of film negatives from 2003, when we had taken a picture at her family’s business, Lamar May Alignment & Brake Shop.
I had gotten to know her when I went out to the business twice this year to take photos for our online Readers Choice competition.
There is a framed copy of the 2003 story and photo behind her desk, and she asked if there was any way to get a better copy of the photo, which had been printed on a black-and-white page.
I was sure we still had the negative, and a few days later, I started looking for it.
It so happened that one of our reporters, April Sowell, was curious about how we used to handle photos. She asked the right person, because I knew all about it.
I unlocked the old darkroom, now unused, and told her how film used to be developed and prints made of images chosen for the paper.
Then we went to some cabinets where a lot of negatives are stored. We have them from about 1987 until about 2004, when we switched to digital cameras.
We had stopped developing our own film by the early 1990s. It was easier to drop them off at Paul and Brenda Deer’s store, One Hour Photo Perfect, in Edgewood Mall and pick up the negatives the next morning.
Anyway, it took a few minutes, but I finally located the binders that contained negatives from 2003, and found what Joy was looking for.
It helped that an order slip with the film said the name of the negative, when it was scanned into our computer system, should be “Lamar.”
The order slip also said the picture was horizontal and was for the Business page.
I told April, and then Joy a few days later when she came to get the negative, that it was fun to be able to go back and find something that went into the newspaper 20 years ago. At least that says the filing system we used worked.
The great irony of the story is that, while we have tens of thousands of negatives in the building, we have no way to turn them into computer images or actual prints.
The scanner that did that work gave up the ghost many years ago, after we had switched to digital cameras. There was no need to replace it.
Joy told me she had to go to a store in Jackson to get a print of the negative. She had them make a 16-x-20 copy, and it is a massive improvement over what came out in the paper in 2003.
For starters, the print is much larger, and it also is in color. She and her husband Tommy have to be pleased that Lamar May, who died this past March, was at the center of the picture, which included about 10 employees.
If you’re out at their business on Park Drive any time soon, I’m sure you’ll see the photo on the wall behind the long counter.
I got the pecan pie from Joy, and it was fun to show April how our photography system worked. But it all reminded me that moving from film to digital made our work a lot easier.
Some people use digital cameras, but most of today’s smartphones take really good pictures. I use mine all the time to get a shot for the paper.
These phones are so smart that they can automatically adjust for problems like low lighting. And when you get an image onto a computer screen, Adobe Photoshop can fix just about any flaw.
100 years from now, the Ganeath Brewer Daniel of the 22nd century will come across our negatives and wonder who’s in all these pictures. At least this column has the info for sheet 50 from 2003.
