Sharp photos, sharper memories
Tina White continues to piece together the story of a distinct Palmerston North business, Elmar Studios.
Last week’s Memory Lane story about Elmar Photography Studios and its cache of unidentified Palmerston North photo negatives – now being digitised by the city library heritage team – has sparked a wave of memories from people who remembered the iconic business and its founder Frank Mccready.
Recollections also of Frank’s son Frank Mccready Jr and even his grandson Frank Mccready III have beamed a new light on this enterprising family, now part of our local history.
Here’s what readers remembered.
Mary Gough, nee Mary Mccready, one of the five children of Frank Mccready Sr and his wife Pearl, worked with her father in the photography studio.
‘‘I grew up in the Elmar environment, worked at Elmar myself, until 1963. It was then at 459 Main St, Hopwood’s tenant. Various of the family were involved over the years,’’ she recalls.
‘‘It was great to see [in the story] acknowledgment of my father’s entrepreneurial career as a photographer [he was, in fact, so much more than that] and to know that the material has been so well received by the library.’’
Stan Wells worked as a parttime candid photographer at Elmar Studios for almost 18 years, from the late 1960s until about 1974, as well as working a couple of other jobs.
‘‘When we first moved to Palmerston North in the 1950s, I was working for Alexander Clark’s [in Fitzherbert Ave].’’
Stan’s wife Pat takes up their story: ‘‘Stan worked really hard – you know, we were a young family – mortgages and babies. Stan rode around [to events] on his bike, taking a change of clothes if the weather was wet. He took photos of debutantes, biked out to Linton to take pictures of soldiers, Saturday night balls, maybe on a Sunday afternoon he’d photograph a christening.
‘‘If he took a bad photo he didn’t get paid.’’
Eventually Wells ‘‘motorised’ his bike, making his journeys much easier. He would develop the pictures late at night after an evening job. It involved fixing the image on strips of celluloid with chemicals and then rinsing the strips in the family bath and hanging them up to dry.
Photos were taken in multiples and customers were shown proof sheets, to choose the shots they liked best.
‘‘If people liked several, they’d buy more.’’
In 1971, Frank Mccready Sr sold his photography business to his son, Frank Jr, who started a fastprocessing photo business. Enter Phil Monk.
‘‘I worked for Commercial Union Insurance during the early 70s, and Elmar Studios was one of my clients,’’ he says. ‘‘I had a lot to do with Frank Jr, who was quite a character — he had a habit of prodding you on the shoulder when in conversation.
‘‘From memory, the shop shifted from 459 Main St to 475, because Frank purchased a very large machine that developed a 30-frame 35-millimetre colour film in one hour. The machine ran down one side of the shop, and one of the benefits was silver, as a by-product of the process. I do know he had quite a few ingots of silver in his safe. He had a big interest in Mercedes-benz cars and frequently changed models.’’
Neil Jepsen is 72, and still works 10 hours a day at the company he founded in 1976 – Jepsen Acoustics and Electronics.
He knew Frank Mccready Jr well for many years, during the time Frank ran the one-hour photo processing business, and had earlier also worked with Frank’s brother Bill Mccready at Barlow Electronics on Ferguson St. It had been co-owned by Bill and ‘‘a fantastic gentleman of the old school’’, Gordon Barlow.
The fast-photo craze ‘‘swept the country’’, Neil says, ‘‘but soon died a death when digital cameras came along.’’
Asked about the sometimes ‘‘pinkish’’ hue of fast photos in those days, he says: ‘‘No colour print will last as long as black and white because of the colour dyes used in the process. Modern paper is much better than the Kodak paper of the 1980s. It was not operator error – it was inherent in the process and perhaps the machine [would be] set to process a little too quickly, with not enough wash time.’’
Jepsen and Frank Mccready Jr set up one-hour processing machines in Wellington, Christchurch, Napier, Tauranga and Hamilton, and most of the shops were called Elmar Studios.
Frank Jr was a careful businessman, Jepsen recalls.
‘‘One morning at 3am I was working on a machine in the main shop and had just done several test prints, which would take about 12 minutes to process, before I could see if my adjustments were optimum. Whilst I was waiting I popped next door and bought a paper from the chip shop and was reading whilst waiting.
‘‘Frank came up to me and said, ‘I hope you’re not charging me to read the paper’. The following week when I made out my bill I showed time charged, with 3am to 3.15am free of charge. In those days I was charging $19 per hour. I never knew if he was serious, or just taking the [mickey] with me, but I enjoyed the last laugh. I liked Frank and we had enormous respect for each other.’’
That was 40 years ago, but the memories are still sharp. So are the Elmar photos capturing the faces and places of yesterday in Palmerston North – now in digital form – as clear as on the day they were taken.
■ If you recognise any faces in these Elmar photos, or on the archives’ Manawatu¯ Heritage website, please contact the Palmerston North City Library heritage team leader at lesley.courtney@pncc.govt.nz
Email: tinawhite29@gmail.com