How I became a photographer

As a kid, I was much like Thomas Edison in that I liked to tinker with stuff and take things apart and put them back together; sometimes they still worked when I finished my explorations. I never liked for mechanical things to whip me; I figured if it was made by man, I could fix it when it broke. I was pretty successful with that philosophy until the RA put the whammy to me. I also liked to build things, although I was never an inventor. Before I was 10 years old, I constructed a cat-whisker radio which would receive local A.M. stations. No cats were harmed. Another device I put together was a camera; at least it was what I called it. It was a camera obscura type device and of all things, I used waxed paper from the kitchen for film. In the ancient times before tv was commonplace in the countryside and before Howdy-Doody or Roy Rogers metal lunch boxes were introduced to rural kids, we sometimes carried our lunch to school in metal, one-gallon lard buckets. Around 1957, my first real science teacher told us about such cameras, and that wax paper could be used as film if the exposure was long enough. I realized one of the old lard buckets would work decently because it was pretty well air and light tight with its metal lid in place. I retrieved one from the smokehouse, took out my pocket knife and after some painstaking drilling on the center-bottom of the bucket, I had a neat, tiny hole bored. I begged a piece of wax paper and taped it to the inside of the lid, covered the little hole with tape, secured the lid tightly to the bucket, and went on a photo journey. I found a good spot to place the bucket camera, secured it with rocks and firewood, and had it pointed at a high contrast tree and corner of our smokehouse. I removed the tape and left the contraption to do its thing. Next day I went back and there was no image on the wax paper. I went through the process with fresh paper several times, increasing exposure by days. At last I was rewarded with a dim but discernible image of the building's corner on the paper after an eight day exposure. I kept trying and found that about 10 days was the best I was going to get. Of course the weak image soon faded away when the wax was re-exposed to normal light, but I had become a photographer. I've since been told that this technique will not work with plain, kitchen-type wax paper, but I saw it, my mother saw it, my uncle saw it, and my grandmother saw it. It definitely worked. Poo on the nay sayers!
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