Spiratone Brand & Other Camera Gadgets

Discussion 6 posts |  Only members can post. Join?

About Spiratone Brand & Other Camera Gadgets

During the heyday of film photography, when an enthusiastic amateur had a 'gadget bag' and dozens of filters for every lens he owned, the Mecca and center of the universe was Spiratone in Manhattan, and the Bible was Shutterbug magazine.

Fred Spira imported and rebranded just about every weird, strange, one-off, and interesting device one could imagine for lightening the wallets and increasing the uniqueness of just about every shutterbug's photographs, and he did it at a low price, too!

This group is dedicated to the vintage gadgets, gizmos, tricks, and devices that made photography cheap and fun. Take photos OF them, or take photos WITH them, both are welcome here.

Please DESCRIBE what you're depicting or using, so we can share your enthusiasm and drive prices for these kinds of things up on eBay (sigh).

Notes on the Spiratone brand:

I found this post, ostensibly from Greg Spira, son of the late Fred Spira, on www.dpreview.com. He describes briefly whatever became of Spiratona:

Forum Open Talk
Subject Re: Spiratone [SIMILAR]
Posted by spira [PROFILE]
Date/Time 19:22:04, 17 July 2007 (GMT)

...The reality is that while my father was the original owner of Spiratone, he sold the company in the late 1960s to a much larger company, Interphoto, in order to expand the company. Unfortunately, Interphoto did terribly in the 1970s and tried to save itself by launching an antitrust case against Kodak arguing that Kodak was breaking ate law by producing better products at cheaper prices. Once that suit was dismissed, Interphoto fell under the control of a greedy and incompetent businessman with possible mob connections who proceeded to personally take over and run every unit of the company into the ground. Finally, in February 1987, when Spiratone was the only unit of the corporation still functioning, he fired my father and proceeded to run Spiratone into the ground within a few years. Once Spiratone went bankrupt, the guy fled to Pittsburgh (not paying many months of rent on the main office building, which my father still owned at the time) and illegally continued to use the Spiratone name. Just before the bankruptcy, the jackal tried to sell the operation back to my father, but the company was too far gone to try to save.

My father is also still alive, albeit barely. [NOTE: Fred Spira has since passed away, sadly]

...That tiny store in Manhattan was not Spiratone's primary store. The main store was in Queens, first in Astoria and then Flushing. They were both larger than the Manhattan store, though they weren't huge by any definition. And Spiratone later moved to a somewhat larger Manhattan store. ...the bulk of the business was mail order. Spiratone was one of the first retailers in the country to acquire an 800 number and that, along with the monthly ads in Popular and Modern, led to a great deal of growth that couldn't possibly have happened as a film developer/photo supply store, which is what Spiratone started as. That early Spiratone store was a remnant of the early days. Mail-order was really the only way to successfully establish a business around all the unusual photographic gadgets that Spiratone had manufactured abroad; even NYC couldn't have supported a store with that focus at the time

Eventually, I hope to put up a Spiratone site on the web with copies of our old catalogs, ads and newsletters.

Greg Spira

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiratone