A while back, my friend John Bolin came from California to see my camera collection. He brought along a few old Kodak shots of a camera he made as a boy of 13. No doubt it’s a TK30 mock up, complete with toilet paper rolls for lenses and Christmas tree lights for tally lights. You really have to marvel at the friction head and the viewfinder hood! Most excellent work, John! Unfortunately, we can’t see the pedestal, but it had a steering ring and wheels, just like the big boys’ version.

I made myself a camera at around age 10, and my dad even had one made for me for Christmas of 1961, when I would have been 11. It tilted up and down via a hinge in the pole that supported it, and unfortunately all it took was one good tilt forward and that was all she wrote, but it was the thought that counts. In conversations with many of you, I hear stories about the cameras many of you made, but like me, many of you drew them, too!

Below are more than a dozen really good pictures our friend Martin Perry drew as a kid. I swear, they look almost exactly like the pictures I used to draw. I started drawing them about age 10 and drew them until I was 15. Martin now runs Phillips Productions in Dallas, and owns a nice GE camera collection.