Lots of memories developed at Cameraland

When I was a kid, there were a bunch of them scattered around town. By the mid and late ’60s, there were three, maybe four photo-finishing shops in downtown Nashua and a couple out on the fringes.

Then there was one.

The final score: Six different locations during six decades. One name. One founder. One family. One unbending philosophy: Service After the Sale.

Too many loyal customers and friends to count.

A million memories rolled in the other day as I absorbed the latest dispatch from downtown Nashua, that one of its most recognizable icons – the giant, 35mm film cassette from which flows a length of “film” bearing the name “Camera- land” in gold letters – will soon disappear from the landscape it has graced since the spring of 1948, when an industrious, indefatigable 20-something bought Art Marchand’s second-floor Main Street photo studio and grew it into the homey, casual shop where everybody knows your name.

To us longtime locals, especially we who dabble in some form of picture-making, nothing in these parts is as synonymous with cameras, film developing and passport photos as the name Lawrence. Sure, there have been others over the last half-century: Goodman, Turcotte, Leclerc, Croteau, Bryant, Saltmarsh to name a few. While none of them failed outright, neither did they choose, as did Fred, Lorraine, and later, Brian Lawrence, to hold fast to their original business model and make it work for 61 years through thick, thin and near-constant marketplace changes.

Personally, growing up with a shutterbug father who took photos for work, at home, in church, on vacation, when it snowed, when it was hot, of my first haircut, my first Thanksgiving, on every birthday and just about every holiday ever known to man, I may have seen more of Fred and Lorraine Lawrence than did their own kids.

If it wasn’t to pick up a spare camera part, a new lens, a box of flashbulbs or a dozen sheets of film (Pop’s preferred canvas was 4-by-5 sheet film he pre-loaded in two-sheet carriers and exposed, one at a time, in his trusty Speed Graphic), we might be at Fred’s counter to drop off a roll of that newfangled Koda-something film that went into the mail and magically came back a week or two later as 12 square little pictures – in color!

We rarely just went in, did business and left in any sort of timely fashion. Pop and Fred always seemed to have something really important to talk over.

More often than not, they’d reach a point where they’d lower their voices, then laugh together loudly, forcing this hyper, impatient small fry to draw the only logical conclusion: They must be laughing at making me wait.

Later, as nature honed my apparent congenital predisposition to chasing every siren and flashing light and need to be ringside, if not in the midst of, every natural and man-made disaster imaginable, I, like Pop before me, found myself visiting Fred and Lorraine on a regular basis.

Somewhere around the start of Nixon’s second term, I’d followed Pop’s footsteps into the rickety, smoky old newsroom, a cub reporter and gopher poster-boy willing to do everything from fetch coffee and type the TV listings to report sports scores and go out and try to take photos.

So naturally my trail led back to Cameraland, where soon a strangely quiet kid – goodness, has he changed! – began appearing behind the counter.

“That’s my son, Brian,” Fred told me one day.

A few weeks later, I heard the kid talking. And – he’ll kill me for this –he hasn’t stopped since.

But just like Pop and Fred, Brian and I had a lot of important stuff to talk about: The latest poop on downtown’s shadier characters, for instance, or the newest batch of, shall we say, creatively composed domestic documentaries that Mrs. What’s-Her-Face’s new boyfriend brought in to get developed.

My leisurely lunchtime strolls along Main Street, which didn’t happen without a stop at Cameraland, turned, regrettably, into several-mile car trips in ’83, when the Telegraph family collectively packed up and moved across the river. But still I visited, sometimes for business, always for pleasure, usually taking a seat on still-unopened shipping cartons along the wall.

“Oh yeah, I need to put that stuff away,” Brian would say before resuming yet another important conversation that had nothing to do with cameras or film.

Yet customers, no matter how many piled in at once, were never ignored at Cameraland. The Lawrences had this knack for answering a technical question, writing up a sales slip and complaining about the weather or the noise from the Park Street construction project or the downtown parking problem almost in the same motion.

I clearly remember hanging out, shooting the bull, or maybe I was tenaciously negotiating prices of film and developing chemicals for work, on a late January day in 1986 when the phone rang.

“Really? OK, thanks,” is about all I heard Brian say before hanging up. I knew it must be something big; short conversations are not like Brian, plus he was moving fast toward the shelf where a couple of TVs sat.

“That was my wife, she said turn on the TV, something happened with the Challenger,” he said, turning knobs and pulling at an antenna.

I guess I didn’t quite hear Brian quite right, because even hearing the newsman and looking at live images right in front of me, it took several minutes for it to sink in: “Oh, holy ... did that thing just blow up?”

The answer came from my pager, which, in the pre-cell phone era, is how the boss shouted “get over to (here, there, wherever) right away!”

That’s one of many memories Brian, Lorraine and I shared when I popped by the other day, mostly to promise “I’ll come back when I have more time.”

And I will, because I need at least one more good, stiff dose of small, family-run shop atmosphere to sustain me through those dreaded mall and big-box trips I can never seem to avoid during the holiday shopping season.

Dean Shalhoup’s column appears Saturdays in The Telegraph. He can be reached at 673-3100, ext. 31, or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com.