Spiratone was Fred Spira. He invented many of the accessories that Spiratone sold.
I know you're probably sick of me musing about Spiratone over the years, but that place was instrumental to me developing a serious interest in photography. I was a semi-regular at the Manhattan shop in my late teens, although I only remember visiting the Flushing shop once.
I mostly bought film and little odds and ends there, and did my Kodachrome and Ektachrome processing by Kodak through the shop. My brother bought one of those huge cheap telephotos there, kinda like the one shown above, but I'm very sure he paid far less than $44 and change for it. He called it his "beach lens" and I'll let everyone's imagination go on that one.
🙂
Fred Spira passed away a few years back and his son posted some memories over at APUG at the time. Do a forum search over at
www.apug.org for "fred spira" and I'm sure you will find it.
What I found sort of interesting in the conversation after Fred's passing was that the family pronounced their name "Spear-a" but the company name was known as "Spy-ra-tone", or, LOL, at least they used to answer the phone at the Manhattan branch that way.
🙂
Willoughby's, kind of across the street from Spiratone, was another I remember very well. I befriended one of their staff members, but we lost contact after I went away to college.
There were several others in the area. Minifilm, where I bought my Pentax Spotmatic, was over on 8th Avenue, and Olden was in the triangle at Broadway and 6th. Avenue but they were usually closed when I ventured into the city. There was another one, downtown a bit, in the "teens", which I can't think of the name of (I'm sure I will just after I hit POST) which had the reputation of being somewhat of a shyster.
