1/4/2024 0 Comments Ms powermail rochester nyAlso, there would have been no candy.īy the time the offer came, last year, I knew the experience likely wouldn’t be magical. The only difference was that my own Wonka was dead, cremated, and interred beneath a cylinder of Georgia marble at the factory gates. My first memories were recorded on Kodak film and developed at the grocery store, and what company could be more important than the company that did that? (I was already pretty convinced of the stunning importance of my personal narrative.) Nobody was offering, but a peek behind the curtain at the company’s sprawling business and manufacturing domain-then called Kodak Park, encompassing 1,200 acres traversed by a private railroad-would have been the equivalent of being allowed inside Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Even in 2003, when I made that class trip, we were encouraged to believe we should feel lucky that he had chosen Rochester to lavish his attention upon.īeing a child, and having no accomplishments or distinguishing characteristics of my own, I did derive some pride from living near the home of Kodak. In 1920, his free pediatric dental clinic removed the tonsils of 1,470 children in seven weeks. The city where we stood was just another of his accomplishments: Eastman funded Rochester’s colleges and its hospital system, its cultural institutions, its nonprofits, its parks, its suburban housing developments. His company, founded in 1880, invented the first easy-to-use consumer camera and thereby amateur photography it achieved a near-monopoly on the consumer-film business, capturing the imagination of the entire world it was Hollywood, and it was New York, and it was as grand as history-with a simple search, even a child can find images of Eastman hosting Thomas Edison, nonchalantly, in his backyard. And nobody could argue that Eastman hadn’t worked. It was meant to be edifying: To work is to live. Telling this story to a bunch of 10-year-olds was not meant to be morbid. Why wait?” Eastman shot himself in the heart with a Luger pistol at the age of 77. At the end of the tour-in a second-story sitting room full of personal artifacts-we were presented, matter-of-factly, with a copy of Eastman’s suicide letter, dated March 14, 1932: “My work is done. But our job there was to stare at old cameras the size of our bodies, marvel at the luxury of having a pipe organ in your house, and write down what a daguerreotype is to prove that we’d been paying attention. Housed in a Colonial Revival mansion built for the founder of the Eastman Kodak Company in 1905, the museum is home to one of the most significant photography and film collections in the world. W hen I was in fifth grade, my class took a field trip to the George Eastman Museum, in Rochester, New York, as the fifth graders at my rural elementary school, 30 minutes south of the city, did every year. This article was published online on June 16, 2021. FIGHT, a group seeking to change Kodak’s hiring practices, protests at a shareholders’ meeting, 1967. Postcard of the Kodak Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, 1964. High Falls in Rochester, New York, Kodak’s hometown. Above, clockwise from bottom-right: Kodak founder George Eastman takes a picture, circa 1925.
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