In 1986, when she was 10 and I was 8, my sister was playing tag at recess. She went down one of those playground firemen's poles, but... she forgot to hold on to the pole. She fell flat on her back on the frozen sand (this was January in Chicago), breaking it in a couple of places.
She was paralyzed from the waist down and out of school for the next year, getting home tutoring while undergoing intense physical therapy (within a couple of years she could walk normally, and even turn a cartwheel now and then). Now, my mother was an insomniac, and one of her overnight passions was tuning into the 50,000 watt radio stations that you could pick up from all over the western hemisphere. One night, feeling the stress I suppose, she called into a wee-hours talk show on WBZ in Boston and relayed a bit of the story (I don't really know how it tied in with the show, but that's not so important).
To make a long story short, at this point someone at the station took down her address and started up something of a "collection" for this stranger halfway across the country, and we found ourselves with a lot of mail. Much of it was of the "here are things to help keep you occupied and your mind active while you're stuck in bed" sort, including... two tiny kodak 110 fixed-focus cameras. One for my sister, and one for myself (the nice lady who sent them didn't want the little brother feeling left out). 😉
Well, we carried those everywhere (I did, anyway, and she did too once she was out and about again, hehe). Started out as a "documentary" photography doing "street" on the playground. 😉 Took the last few pictures of a good friend of mine, in fact, a few hours before he died in an accident.
Went through many, many 110 cartridges, always eyeing my parents' "grown-up" camera, which was a 35mm fixed-focus Kodak. I didn't realize that it was about the same thing as my 110, just with a bigger negative. It used film in rolls, so it was a real camera. Used that through my teens after the 110 was left on the top of our station wagon and lost during a camping trip, and bought my first Pentax K1000 upon starting college. And the rest is history! I doubt I'll ever bother with another Kodak camera, but they certainly do serve a purpose in being available to even those of very modest means. These days, of course, if you know where to look on the internet all sorts of things are available for not much money, but it was different when your options where what you saw on the shelf in the store, and nothing more--unless you took your chances at the Salvation Army shop, garage sales, or etc.
