[rollei_list] Re: OT: Antiques Roadshow... Photography Edition
- From: David Sadowski <dsadowski@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:12:38 -0500
One other thing I recall from my photo industry days back in the 1980s
is visiting the Deardorff company here in Chicago. Jack Deardorff was
quite a character, may he rest in peace.
As I recall, they ordered some small amount of stuff, and we had to
require cash on the barrel head, as they would otherwise have run a
tab and ben very slow payers. Jack told me they were having trouble
getting the right kind of wood they needed for cameras because of an
ongoing civil war in some South American country.
The last straw for Deardorff, or so I was told, was when a big
commercial studio (Kranzten) went out of business and put a whole
bunch of used Deardorffs on the market. That killed sales of new ones
and they folded. This is back when Chicago was a center for catalog
photography (Sears, Wards, Spiegel, etc.).
Some of the Kranzten people started their own shop called Silver
Lining Graphics.
The bank auctioned off Deardorff's assets. Jack D. tried to buy some
of it back and showed up at the auction wearing a fake moustache but
he was recognized.
Of course, their market was the old fashioned large format view
camera, 8x10 and 11x14. They had made a 4x5 many years earlier called
the TriAmPro. In actuality, this was a 5x7 camera with a 4x5 back on
it. Not that many were sold around 1950 and they gave it up.
There was a big article about the history of Deardorff done many years
ago in the Chicago Reader and I don't think it's been reprinted
anywhere. This may have been done while Mere was still alive.
I saw some years back that Jack had a new camera on the market in very
limited production. I believe he had a falling out with Ken Hough who
is the master of all things Deardorff.
A few years after Deardorff folded, I met a woman with the same last
name and asked if they were related. She said they were but that Jack
was estranged from the rest of the family.
---
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