Robert L. ‘Bob’ Willoughby
Pioneering Kodak-trained color photo processor was known for ‘superior eye for color’ despite losing sight in his left eye
Robert L. “Bob” Willoughby, a pioneering, Kodak-trained color photo processor who later worked for District Photo, one of the largest processing firms in the U.S., died of pulmonary failure May 2 at Adventist HealthCare Shady Grove Medical Center in Rockville. The former longtime Parkville resident was 85.
Robert Lee Willoughby, son of Ira Franklin Willoughby, a merchant mariner and wallpaper installer, and Theresa Elizabeth Willoughby, a homemaker, was born in Baltimore and raised in Little Italy.
A graduate of Patterson Park High School, Mr. Willoughby was in an accident as a student that eventually cost him an eye.
“He was watching a Patterson Park football game when the stands collapsed, and he took an elbow into his left eye,” said his son, Christopher Willoughby, of Arbutus. “He had microsurgery and was in the hospital for three months, but they couldn’t save the eye.”
Despite the injury, Mr. Willoughby found a career in the photo processing industry. He owed much of that career to the 1954 consent decree that enjoined Kodak from tying the sale of its color film to the processing of the film.
Two brothers, Ben Ritz and Ed Ritz, founders of Ritz Camera, had established a black-and-white photo processing lab in Philadelphia, and in 1957, Mr. Willoughby went to work for them as an overnight courier transporting black-and-white film to Philadelphia to be processed.
The Ritz brothers then planned to come to Baltimore and establish a color lab to augment their Philadelphia operation. To find a suitable location, they called a local rabbi to get the name of a Shabbos goy, a non-Jew whom they could employ, family members said.
Mr. Willoughby was tapped by the brothers to help find a location in downtown Baltimore for the color lab. In 1958, he was sent to Kodak in Rochester, New York, to learn Kodacolor film processing to operate the massive color processing machines the Ritz brothers had leased from Kodak, machines that turned unprocessed negatives into color pictures overnight by the thousands.
“He was among the first outside of Kodak to be trained on those machines, and when he came back to Baltimore, he began to train others,” his son wrote in a biographical profile of his father’s life. “In 1963, when Kodak introduced the Instamatic Camera, my father was again sent to Rochester to learn the new 126 film cartridge format that would make the Instamatic line the biggest selling camera in history.”
Mr. Willoughby refused to let having only one eye interfere with his professional life.
“He was thought by many in his field to have a superior eye for color, saturation, contrast, and light in photographs,” his son wrote. “There were those — including myself — who thought this was an amusing irony, since he had lost the sight in his left eye in an accident as a teenager. Still, for decades, his one good eye was considered by most in his profession to be the finest available arbiter of a picture’s quality.”
Mr. Willoughby left Ritz Camera in the mid-1960s when he helped found a new overnight processing facility, Paramount Photo, with Abe Bloom and Leon Bloom.
“His leaving caused some consternation between himself and Ed Ritz, but their rift was short-lived, and they remained friends until Mr. Ritz’s passing in 2012,” his son wrote. “In fact, when Mr. Ritz died, a picture taken of him and my father in 1959 was hanging in his office. I worked directly for Mr. Ritz for a time and can verify the picture’s presence because I gave it to him.”
After Paramount Photo, which was at 33rd Street and Greenmount Avenue, was purchased in 1981 by District Photo, one of the largest independent film processing operations in the country, the operation was closed, and the equipment moved to a facility in Greenbelt that Mr. Willoughby managed for several years.
Mr. Willoughby left District Photo and briefly worked for Segal-Majestic Studio in Baltimore before being hired in 1989 by Eckerd Corp. to oversee the overnight film processing operation at its plant in Hollywood, Florida.
“Because Eckerd had processing agreements with both their own pharmacies and several other chains, the plant averaged an input of more than 100,000 rolls of film a night, six days a week, which is more than 31 million photos a year,” his son wrote.
His son said in a telephone interview that if someone has pictures more than two decades old, the likelihood is high that they were made by Mr. Willoughby or someone he trained or supervised.
In the late 1990s, Mr. Willoughby returned to Maryland when Kodak hired him to run its Qualex facility in Rockville, where a research section of its Digital Image Science Division was housed.
After restructuring the plant, Mr. Willoughby retired in 1999, and less than five years later, digital replaced film as the primary source of capturing images.
His son recalled that as children, he and several of his siblings would occasionally go to work with Mr. Willoughby at Paramount Photo.
“One Sunday afternoon, a negative machine seized, and a roll of film was damaged clearing the jam. Even then, Paramount was processing thousands of rolls a night, but my father went into a darkroom by himself and attempted to recover the negative. When he came out, I asked him why make sure that the roll was saved was so important,” his son wrote.
“He looked at me without anger but with gravity and said, ‘Do you see this roll of film? This doesn’t belong to me. The people who took this don’t care about the thousands I got right tonight; they care about this one. And they should.’ ”
For years, Mr. Willoughby lived on Baker Avenue in Parkville; he later moved to Germantown in Montgomery County and, finally in 2005, to Falling Waters, West Virginia.
In his retirement, he worked with physically and mentally challenged people through Rehabilitation Systems Inc. in Martinsburg, West Virginia.
Besides photography, Mr. Willoughby’s interests included drawing caricatures.
At Mr. Willoughby’s request, no services will be held.
In addition to his son, he is survived by three daughters, Nicole Willoughby of Gaithersburg, Samantha Willoughby of Potomac and Theresa Bohrer of Martinsburg; five grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren. Another son, Robert “Robby” Willoughby, died in 2003.
Marriages to Blanche King and Michele Huberty ended in divorce.