[Leica] Re: Cleveland

["Gary Todoroff" <datamaster@humboldt1.com>]

From: <ECCity@aol.com>

> You must wander around the old warehouses in what is left of the windy
> streets and bridges along the Flats.  .  .

On my first co-op job assignment as a freshman at Antioch College (near
Dayton), I spent a windy, cold winter in Cleveland working in a chemistry
lab in the Flats by day and photographing it by night in all its industrial
glory. This was right around the time the Cuyahoga River caught fire, so I
could almost pretend I was in a war zone, sneaking around steel mills and
railway yards with my Ricoh Singlex in pre-Leica days.

Some fond memories - Getting my film confiscated by guards at Jones and
Luaghlin Steel; my Ricoh making odd crunching sounds at 6am atop a
biting-cold, wind-swept bridge over the Flats, opening the camera and seeing
little chunks of frozen film scatter in the breeze; for a better view of
molten steel, mounting my tripod atop the coupler between box cars in a
deserted ( I thought) train yard, when the crashing sounds of an engine
hooking-on up the line overtook me as I crashed into the end of the box car,
then jumping from a moving train with a camera and tripod strung around my
neck. Now that was REALLY dumb! And of course, the still fond memory of
somehow surviving my 19 year-old notion of immortality.

On returning to a different kind of insanity at Antioch College in 1966, I
did my first "co-op paper" as a slide program on the Flats, which I still
have on old Ektachromes and Kodachromes that are in pretty good shape after
all these years. Back then, I had no environmental agenda or thought of
exposing anything other than film. The awesomeness of size and shape, the
industrial fire, contrasting with snow that stayed fresh for a few minutes
before taking on new patterns under a sooty film - all that was the
beginning of trying to capture something really big on a small fragment of
film.

I'm still trying to do the same today, but Martin, do stay away from the
trains.

Regards,
Gary Todoroff
Tree LUGger