In My Footsteps: A Gen-X Nostalgia Podcast

Episode 140: The Demise & Potential Comeback of Ames Department Stores; Old School Mall Portrait Studios; Best-Selling Atari 2600 Games(4-17-2024)

• Christopher Setterlund • Season 1 • Episode 140

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The rise and fall, and rise again(possibly) of Ames Department Stores. Old school trips to the mall to get professional photos taken. The best-selling Atari 2600 games ever.
Episode 140 returns after a week off filled with fun nostalgia.
It begins with the story of a Northeast staple for decades. Generations of those who grew up in that part of the United States likely have fond memories of shopping at the Ames Department Stores. However the rise of competition like Walmart and Target, along with other issues, eventually spelled the end of Ames. Now there is a possibility that the chain that once was the 4th largest in the country could be making a comeback. We'll cover all of it from the rise, to the fall, to the potential comeback.
In the days before smartphones and digital cameras getting a photograph professionally taken was a chore. At times one had to venture out to an actual portrait studio. Luckily for many that grew up in decades past these types of studios could often be found in the local mall, especially Sears. We go way Back In the Day to reminisce about what it was like getting photos taken at Sears and other studios in the 1980s and beyond.
For Gen-Xers, the Atari 2600 was the first memorable home video game console. It brought many arcade games, and some non-arcade titles, into people's living rooms. But which titles were the most popular? This week's Top 5 will share the best-selling Atari 2600 games ever.
There will also be a new This Week In History and Time Capsule centered around the first ever 'World Championship' boxing match from the mid-19th century.
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Speaker 00:

Hello, world, and welcome to the In My Footsteps podcast. I am Christopher Setterlund, coming to you from the vacation destination known as Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and this is episode 140. We're back after a week off. I'm going to be bringing the nostalgia as much as I can. We're going to start it off with the story of the Ames department stores famed in the Northeast and the possible comeback of these stores that may be the most crazy comeback ever. We're going to go way, way back in the day and look at some embarrassment and slices of time as we look at the Sears family portraits and history of department store photography studios. There's going to be a brand new top five that are going to be the top five best-selling Atari 2600 games ever. Did you play any of these games? And there'll be a brand new This Week in History and Time Capsule centered around the first ever quote-unquote world championship boxing match in England. All of that coming up right now on episode 140 of the In My Footsteps podcast. Well, I'm back after a week. Like I had said in episode 139, I was skipping a week because I had all these projects that I was trying to finish. And it seemed like I was getting a little bit done on each, but none were getting finished. So if you follow me on social media, you saw there were a few different videos. There were several blogs. I did a photo trip. God, I haven't done a photo trip in years, really. I have said several times, I don't know if it's just me or if any of you out there feel this way, but since COVID hit, so it was just over four years ago, I feel like my conception of time has changed where things that were three, four years ago feel like they were yesterday and so forth. So the things with photo trips, I bought this nice camera. And I hardly ever really take it out and use it. It shoots 4K video, which if you follow me on YouTube, you've seen I've done 4K videos of different places in New England. But I feel like I got kind of used to this bare bones type life, just doing the same things every day. During COVID, I was considered essential worker because at the time I worked in a retirement home. But it was basically work and then hide where I live and don't do anything. And at times it feels like it's hard to get out of that mindset. So things like photo trips are good reminders that you can actually do things now again. But I'm back and I have podcasts lined up. I've got a lot of great topics this week, next week, going forward. A lot of fun stuff. I can't do any of that without you. I want to start off by making sure to shout out my Patreon subscribers. Leo, Laurie, Mary Lou, Ashley. For $5 a month if you want to become a subscriber you get access to bonus podcast episodes that are on Patreon. You get early access to YouTube videos, blogs, the main podcast segments from this show. At some point, I might do a video, kind of a weekly wrap-up podcast, and I might end up debuting it on Patreon to have my subscribers let me know what they think of it. It'll be kind of a takeoff of my Initial Impressions 2.0 blog that I'm writing, so it'll be fun and foolish and random. I also know that spending hard-earned money to subscribe to something like my Patreon channel, that might not be feasible for some of you. So it's even better to listen to the show, share it, tell other people about it, subscribe on YouTube. Those are things, getting more views, getting more reviews, all of that stuff, that means a lot. It lets other people know, oh, maybe I should check this show out because these people are checking it out. But of course, when it comes to getting more views, more reviews, that starts with me. That starts with me putting out good content, fun nostalgia as I'm really embracing that. I hope you're enjoying it. I still dip my toes into the history a little bit more. But honestly, history and nostalgia kind of go hand in hand. Nostalgia is the old days, quote unquote. And I'm going to start this podcast off with a perfect example of nostalgia and history colliding. As we look at the history of the Ames department stores, so that's for all of you that grew up in New England in the Northeast, and the story of the possible comeback of Ames. So let's get into that story right now. For those of us that grew up in New England in the Northeast... The Ames department store holds a significant spot in our hearts. For generations, decades, people either went to Ames or maybe another one of the local department stores like Bradley's or Caldor. I would say if you grew up anywhere from the 1960s through the 90s, one of those department stores kind of has that special place in your heart. It's hard to imagine that Ames wasn't nationwide. Just like when I was growing up, I didn't realize that Bradley's wasn't everywhere. The main reason why I'm doing this segment now at this time about the history of Ames is that the rumor is that Ames is coming back. Of course, with Ames, when it comes to any of those stores that have gone out of business with rumors of coming back or rumors of resurrection like Toys R Us or even places like Radio Shack, it's one of those I'll believe it when I see it. But there's a lot of smoke to the fire here. Tons of articles. If you pause this podcast and Google Ames Department Store, yeah, you'll get some history like I'm going to share in a minute, but you'll also get recent articles about the story that Ames is on its way back. It began in late 2022, where there was a LinkedIn profile that said in spring 2023, Ames was coming back. And obviously here we are, spring of 2024, and there's none. It was earlier this year, no more than a few months ago, that a Twitter X profile that's supposed to be AIMS says that the relaunch of the AIMS stores is coming in the spring slash early summer of 2026. And there are going to be up to three dozen actual physical brick and mortar Ames department stores by the end of 2027 into 2028. Now, granted, none of this is going to take place for the next two years, so there's plenty of time for this to fall through. And there's no definitive locations, although they say it's going to be a lot in New England, much like it used to be. But for those that are my age, a little bit older, you imagine actually having AIMS come back. Even if you didn't like AIMS, the idea of a brand that you grew up with that has long since been gone making a comeback is something that really warms that nostalgia. The plans are for distribution centers to be near the AIMS locations, AIMS cafes to be at all of these locations. There's going to be online ordering. So it all sounds great, even if it's all BS, but it sounds great, like they actually have a plan. If this ends up being a great comeback for a brand long since forgotten, it'll just add to the storied history of the Ames department store. And that began all the way back in 1958. Two brothers, Milton and Irving Gilman, they opened the very first Ames, which was initially called the Ames Bargain Department Store. And that was in Southbridge, Massachusetts. The whole aim of Ames was to provide consumers with a wide array of goods at affordable prices. Sound familiar? There were a lot of department stores like that that came out around that time. It took a few years, but by the early 1960s, Ames expanded its footprint all across New England. Their idea was to bring this discount retail service to the smaller rural areas of New England. And they did it on the cheap at first, finding these old industrial sites, textile factories, converting them into Ames. And this relatively low cost dabble into the real estate to expand, it paid off in a few years when they finally were added to the New York Stock Exchange in 1967 and they went public in 1972. And this wave of cash that came in from being publicly traded allowed them to open new stores that were actually built for them and not old mills that they took over. The 70s saw the beginning of the heyday of that discount retail idea. So Ames, they continued to grow, diversified its product offerings to cater to a broader customer base to help their expansion. The stores were synonymous with value and convenience. It's very similar to the dollar stores today. Think about how many different dollar store companies there are. Dollar Tree, Dollar General. Family Dollar. Are they still around? I think they are. You find them everywhere. It's similar to how it was in the 70s and 80s with Ames and Kaldor and Bradley's. Ames was really aggressive with their expansion. They began buying smaller chains. It started in November 1978 when they bought the 32-store Big N chain. Then it was the King's department stores in 1984, which netted them another nearly 200 locations. And then in 1985, it was a chain called GC Murphy. Although to be fair, they didn't convert all of these places that they bought into Ames. Some of them they just sold off to make more money. The initial trouble with the Ames stores came with another purchase, and that was the Zayer chain of discount stores. So in 1988, Ames bought Zare. And at this time, Ames had expanded beyond New England and into the Mid-Atlantic, Midwest. They had hundreds of locations, and they were considered one of the largest discount retailers in the entire country. But that cost of buying all of the Zare locations and trying to convert them to Ames, it saddled them with a lot of debt. In April 1990, so within two years of buying the Zare company, Ames filed for bankruptcy. A big part of this debt that I find fascinating is that Ames was basically giving credit to anybody. So even people that were already with terrible credit or highly in debt, they would just give them credit. So these people would buy merchandise and then just not pay for it. They replaced the Zayer credit card with a Visa card that you could use anywhere people used Visa. So then people would have these cards and just rack up tons of money on them. And some of them weren't even spending money on products at Ames or Zayer. This bout of bankruptcy for Ames, they ended up having to close 370 locations. It actually helped them out. And in 1993, the company was profitable again. But stop me if you've heard this one. There was an increased competition for these retail stores. So you can see where Ames, Caldor, Bradley's, they all went under. At the same time, Walmart, Target, they were coming up. You had places like Kmart were still big. It seemed like Ames was going to be one of these companies that made it through. In 1998, they purchased the Hills department stores. And with that purchase, Ames became the fourth largest discount retail chain behind Walmart, Kmart and Target.

Speaker 06:

Because Ames has thousands of name brand products, all discount priced. So for the big names, I say I've never seen so many famous names.

Speaker 02:

Robin Leach?

Speaker 06:

Come to Ames. Ames, we grew up with better values.

Speaker 00:

So this is 1998. Now, mind you, Ames was out of business four years later. So it's amazing to see how quick these things can change. In 1998, they had approximately 750 locations. But starting in 1999, closures came. It started with just a few stores. Then it was a few dozen stores. In 2001, they filed for bankruptcy again. And the story sounds very similar to Bradley's because Bradley's had bankruptcy. They recovered somewhat, had a second bout. That was the end. And it's kind of the same for Ames. In June 2002, so we're talking four years after they were the fourth largest retailer in the country, they had already closed half of their locations, leaving them with about 327 locations in the country. But by this point, the ship had sailed. People were going to Walmart, Target, still going to Kmart. So Ames faded away. Within two months, so August 2002, Ames announced they were closing all the rest of their locations.

Speaker 02:

And

Speaker 04:

that

Speaker 00:

would have seemed like the end of Ames, much like Bradley's, much like Kaldor, just fade into obscurity. But here we are, talking about the possibility of up to three dozen new AIM stores being opened in the next, let's say, three years. So let's dive into that a little. What's your opinion? Do you think if they open new AIM stores that they're going to be successful? I'm not saying they won't. I'm saying there may actually be a period at the beginning where that rush of nostalgia... Those memories of the bargain hunting and finding these treasures at Ames that are so affordable, that might make them successful at the beginning. I would think as long as they adapt to the current retail landscape, a lot of online shopping, that they might make it. Even if it's not 700 plus locations like they had at their peak in the late 90s. When I first read that article, the first one, there's tons of them out there, but when I read the first article about the possible comeback of Ames, I had to do a segment on the store in general, but then about this possibility. Because you never know, if Ames makes the comeback in a few years and it's successful, who's to say that suddenly there's not Toys R Us is back, KB Toys, Radio Shack, maybe Bradley's. It would be like living in the 1980s again, but without having to wear a VR headset to do it. So that's the story of AIMS, the original AIMS, and the potential comeback. Let me know what you think. Do you think they're going to make it? Do you think they'll even open one store? Or this will just fade away? This week in history, we are going back 164 years ago to April 17th, 1860, and the first ever quote-unquote world championship boxing match held in England. Boxing has had some legends in its time. Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson, Rocky Marciano, Joe Louis, Smoke and Joe Frazier, all the way up to Floyd Mayweather. Rocky Balboa, wait, he wasn't real. All of that pageantry of boxing can trace itself back to this illegal fight that lasted two hours and 27 minutes way back in 1860. The match in and of itself between John Heenan and Tom Sayers, it's far different than a world title fight today. It took place in a field in Hampshire. And like I said, it was seen as illegal. But this here, Heenan versus Sayers, U.S. versus England, it was seen as the fight of the century. Heenan was a 25-year-old laborer from San Francisco, California, and Sayers was 34 years old, and he was the British champion. This is bare-knuckle fighting. It shows how crazy, how different boxing was then because police were alerted about this possible world championship boxing match and it was considered illegal. So they were all on high alert. So you couldn't have this in some big arena. It had to be a village field on the outskirts of Farnborough. At least it was a sunny day. It is said at the time that there were 12,000 people that were there in this field. From what I can gather, there was a ring, so it actually looked like how boxing would be. But they said a bare-knuckle fight that went 37 rounds, and then the ropes were cut, the referee just left, and after there was no referee, there was five more rounds to get this fight up to almost two and a half hours, and then it was declared a draw. What's interesting is that this fight seems to be, at some points, kind of lost to history. Perhaps it's because it was seen as illegal back then and the police had to come and break it up. It was so brutal with bare-knuckle fighting for 40-something rounds. I mean, you think that five-minute fight in They Live, if you know that movie, just imagine a fight that lasted 20 times as long. It ended up with one fighter had a broken arm, another fighter either had his eyes swollen shut or broke his orbital bone. You would have to imagine that 42 rounds of bare knuckle fighting, you're not going to come out of that without some injuries. After the brutality of this fight, there were actually rules put in place for boxing, real rules. It is said that the two fighters shared the purse that was 400 pounds. And if you count for the conversion rate to the dollar and then adjusting for inflation, these two guys that beat each other's faces in for two and a half hours bare knuckle fighting shared a total of just over $18,000. Sadly, these two fighters did not have long legendary careers as sports heroes. Sayers was dead at the age of 39 within a few years. He never fought again. Heenan also died young at the age of 38 in poverty in Wyoming in 1873. But that was the first world championship fight in boxing history. And it took place 164 years ago this week. And now it's time for a brand new time capsule. For this week, we're going back 42 years ago to April 16th, 1982. Let's see what was going on in the world of pop culture back then. The number one song was I Love Rock and Roll by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. This is Joan Jett's most popular and most successful song. It was off of the album also titled I Love Rock and Roll with the song staying at number one for seven weeks. It was hugely popular during the early days of MTV and is every bit the classic rock song and also a slice of 80s pop culture. Speaking of quintessentially 80s, the number one movie was Porky's. It's about a group of high school friends that are looking to lose their virginity, and they get kicked out of a strip club that's owned by a man named Porky. So it centers around them trying to get revenge on Porky. It's very much the adult, crass, sophomoric type humor. It's 33% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, but don't let that stop you. It's definitely a movie I enjoyed as a kid. And it was a massive hit, making $160 million on a budget of between $4 and $5 million. The number one TV show was MASH. This is another legendary show. It was huge in the 70s. The final episode of MASH is one of the highest rated television shows ever. The show's been mentioned before on the podcast in these time capsule segments. MASH is Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, and it's a comedy drama that takes place during the Korean War. In total, the show lasted 11 seasons and 256 episodes from 1972 to 1983. And if you were around back then, April 16th, 1982, maybe you had a new baby, you want to celebrate by having a bunch of people over why not try to make some money on the side with a nice fun 80s Tupperware party if people from then remember those there's loads of great Tupperware stuff you can find in their 1982 catalog tumblers and mugs that include those little white tops you'd put on them for kids that they could drink out of so it wouldn't spill those classic round cups totes that had the covers on them that were all ridged. They were just considered decorative canisters or the taller modular mates. These are the ones that you would pour your cereal into, get it out of the box, and they were clear, kind of oval shaped with a red top. It sounds like I know so much about Tupperware, but I'm looking at the catalog as I'm telling you this, so I'm not that knowledgeable about it. I'll link to the catalog in the description of the podcast if you want to go back in time and remember the greatness of Tupperware. But that'll wrap up another time capsule, another This Week in History. And speaking of the greatness of the 80s, let's jump into a brand new top five that are the best-selling Atari 2600 games ever coming up right now. All of the amazing graphics and the incredibly detailed stories you can get with so many of the games that are out today for all the video game consoles and computers. For me, having grown up in the 80s, nothing beats the classics. Whether you're a little bit younger and you loved the Nintendo NES when that first came out, or if you're a few years older, maybe you remember the Atari 2600. For me, the Atari 2600 is the first ever gaming console that I had, that I played. You had to plug in that little adapter, tie the wires off and switch it to the Channel 3, plug that into the back of the Atari, stick your cartridge in, turn it on. You had the classic joystick, that black square with the joystick on the top and one red button. But hey, that was all you needed. Especially back then when you didn't know that was it. You didn't know what was coming in the next 40 years. The Atari 2600 was originally known as the Atari VCS video game console, and it came out in September 1977, so two months before I was born. It was rechristened the 2600 in November 1982, so yay, right in time for me to turn five years old. That's probably about the time I started playing it. They also released the Atari 5200, so it's double the number, so you figure it's probably double the graphics. I never played that, though. I had my Atari, but I was outside more, and then I think by the time for me to get a new game console, Nintendo was out. They sold millions of these Atari 2600s at $199 a pop, so a little over $1,000 each when adjusted for inflation to 2024. So if you're selling millions of consoles and you've got dozens and dozens of games, what were the most popular games? Well, that's going to be this week's top five. This top five will be a wicked cheat because the honorable mentions are going to be numbers 10 through 6 of the best-selling games, and the top five will be 5 through 1. 26 different games that were released for the Atari 2600 sold at least 1 million copies, including every one I'm going to mention here. Usually the top fives in no particular order, but this week it is in actual order. So the honorable mentions, which I'll just kind of quickly gloss through, include number 10, Demon Attack. Number nine, Ms. Pac-Man. Number eight, the infamous E.T. game. Which, if you don't know why it's infamous, just look it up. E.T. Atari. You'll find out. There were unused copies found in a landfill in New Mexico. Number seven was Defender. And number six was Asteroids. So those are the honorable mentions slash ten through six of the best-selling Atari 2600 games. Do you remember all of those? I remembered a few. obviously Ms. Pac-Man, obviously E.T. because it's infamous, and Asteroids. The actual top five here though, I would be shocked if any of you that have memories of Atari 2600 didn't have these games, play these games, maybe even in the arcade. So let's start at number five with Frogger. Maybe you even know this game from Seinfeld, where George tries to get the Frogger arcade game across the street. It sold 4 million copies. This came out in 1981, and you're supposed to get these frogs across a busy street, a river, and you've got to go across the river jumping on these floating logs. It was said at the time that Frogger was the game with the most ways to die, and there was increasingly difficult levels naturally. In 1997, Hasbro had the rights to Frogger, and they released all these new Frogger games for all of the consoles, widely expanded, better graphics. There was even a Frogger animated segment on the Saturday Supercade show that was on for two seasons in the 80s on CBS. But next up, we get to my very first favorite video game, and that was number four, Pitfall. Think of it as like Indiana Jones. You're going through the jungle. It's a side scroller, jumping over things, swinging across vines to get over either dangerous animals or holes in the ground or quicksand. Pitfall also sold roughly around 4 million copies. This was through Activision. This was one of the Atari games that actually did not have an arcade counterpart. It was about 50-50 as far as games that were on Atari that you could also go and play in the arcade. The goal is to get Pitfall Harry, the main character, as many points as possible in a 20-minute time limit. When I was 5-6 years old, there was nothing more fun than playing Pitfall. There were no other games I liked as much. Things like the Tarzan sound when he would jump over and swing on the vines.

Unknown:

Buzzer.

Speaker 00:

If you've never played this game or never heard of this game, you can go to retrogames.cz and you can play all these games online right now. I'll link to it in the description of the podcast. I linked to them a few episodes back, but Pitfall is considered highly influential. It's considered one of the greatest video games ever. Granted, I might be a little biased, but it's also reviewed that way. Number three is Donkey Kong. I remember playing this one in the arcade as well. Donkey Kong's the gorilla. You've got to climb the series of ladders and platforms to go up and save the princess. You're actually Mario before Super Mario. Donkey Kong sold somewhere around 4.2 million copies during its release. And there have been so many iterations of that character in different video games, on different platforms, cartoons about it. Interestingly, Universal Studios tried to sue Nintendo, who was the creator of Donkey Kong, saying that Donkey Kong and King Kong were too similar, but they lost. So you get the privilege of jumping over rolling barrels and trying to avoid them when Donkey Kong's throwing them at you. Luckily, Mario's got his mallet so he can smash the barrels. This is considered a highly influential game, one of the first climbing games. And the point of the game is to get up there and not only save the princess, Pauline, but to get Donkey Kong to fall. It's another game that's really simple and basic, but so much fun. Just like number two, Space Invaders.

Speaker 05:

This is

Speaker 00:

probably one of the most famous arcade games ever, at least. And if you grew up back then, everybody knew Space Invaders. Space Invaders sold over 6.2 million copies while it was released for Atari. You're this laser cannon on the ground level. And there's these rows of aliens that over time, they start to lower down closer to you. And you've got to shoot them and blow them up before one of them gets to you. And there are a few obstacles in the way that can block your shots. For those that are younger that are growing up now, this type of game would probably be so boring. But if you grew up 40 years ago, it was the coolest thing. The game came out in 1980, and it was considered what they called a console game, where basically you would buy the Atari itself because you wanted to play Space Invaders so bad. An interesting fact is that the man that created the game, Rick Maurer, was compensated so little, only $11,000 for this game, that he never again created another game for Atari. So if they had only paid him more money towards this game that sold over 6 million copies, maybe they'd have gotten other popular games like Space Invaders. Maybe they'd have stuck around and been more viable in the late 80s, early 90s. But here we are. Last but not least, if you know your Atari games, you know one is missing. But if not, the number one best-selling game ever for the Atari 2600 is Pac-Man.

Speaker 02:

Pac-Man

Speaker 00:

sold more than 8 million copies. It was a worldwide phenomenon. Songs were written about it. Pac-Man fever. There was a cartoon about Pac-Man. It's a maze game. There's all these little dots. Pac-Man's this yellow circle with a mouth that he goes around and eats all of the pellets. And there's the ghosts that get released and you've got to avoid the ghosts. Pac-Man was a hugely popular arcade game. So when Atari was making the actual video game, they had to sue other companies that were trying to create knockoff Pac-Man games. What's fascinating is, despite how popular this game was in the arcade and how many copies it sold for Atari, it got a lot of negative reviews saying that it wasn't as good as the arcade version. Despite any negative reviews, a game that sold more than 8 million copies in the early 80s when video games were nothing like they are today, that's a massive success. And I think even to this day, Pac-Man is one of the most well-known video game characters ever made. But again, like I said, maybe I'm biased because I grew up back then. But that wraps up the top five, this case the top ten. Those of you that grew up back then, does that make sense? The top five best-selling games ever for the Atari? Which was your favorite? Or was there a different Atari game that was your favorite? Do any of you remember going somewhere, a store in the mall, buying one of these Atari games, then maybe getting dragged to get a family portrait at Sears? Well, let's cue the embarrassment of some of those photos as we go back in the day and look at Sears family portraits and the history of department store photography studios in general. I'm always so happy that I grew up in the 1980s. It was just this last gasp of a different time. I mean, as a kid growing up then, I was off on my own so much with friends, going on my bike, staying out till the streetlights came on in winter, walking to the golf course and sledding with my friends at 9, 10, 11 years old. You can easily tell my love of the 80s based on this podcast and how much nostalgia is just heaped all over it. But not everything about the 80s was great. So let's go way back in the day and take kind of a humorous look at Sears family portraits, Sears portraits as kids, and just the history of the photography studios that used to be in department stores and malls. Way back before smartphones where you could take 50,000 pictures of everything, including your family, getting actual real professional photos was way more of a chore and way more of a time-consuming idea. I have a couple of boxes of old photos of me, family, friends from back then, 80s into the 90s, and the vast majority of them are just Candids of people of places of things. But then there are these ones that are the professional photos. You that grew up back then, you know what I'm talking about. Sure, you would get school photos and those were professionally done. I mean, on Cape Cod, we had this TD Brown company. You could get the cool laser backgrounds in your photos if you were like me growing up back then. Boy, those didn't age well. For me, when I was littler, baby up to probably five, six years old, I have several professional photos of me dressed nice, sitting in front of some kind of background, likely depending on the time of year. If it's Christmas time, there's a tree. If it's summer, it's flowers. Naturally, I don't have any memories myself of going and getting these done because I was so little. But I can only imagine the work that had to go into it for my mother to get me or me and my sister or then later on my sister and my brother all dressed up and then sit on this platform or something with the background to make sure that the cameraman could get a good photo. By the time there was all five of us kids, I think my mother said enough. We've got enough professional photos of them. The idea of the professional department store photograph, it goes all the way back to 1932 in a company called Olin Mills. It was a husband and wife duo, Olin Mills and Mary Mills. And they first did just photo restorations. But then in 1938, they opened their first studio where Olin took the photos and Mary worked on refining the photos. And it started as door-to-door going to see if people wanted photos taken. They started opening actual studios and stopped going door-to-door. But it wasn't until the children started to take over the company in the early 1970s that they really started to evolve. And this is where the portrait photography was more... students, yearbooks, rather than just baby photos. Olin Mills was so popular that sometime in the 1980s, Kodak did a survey nationwide asking people what business they thought of when they thought of portrait photography. And 60% said Olin Mills. At their peak, there was more than a thousand freestanding studios. I can't say for sure, because like I said, I was a little kid back then, but I'm pretty sure that the company that took the photos of me and my siblings when we were little was CPI Corp, also known as Rembrandt Studios, because they're the ones, even though they started in the early 1940s, they're the ones that expanded in the late 1970s to the Sears department stores. And because we had a Sears department store in the Cape Cod mall, it sort of makes sense. And at that time in the 1970s, when they started moving into the Sears, it was a brilliant move because at that time, about 90% of the US population was within 30 miles of a Sears. And this CPI company... doing the photography, they had their sales tripled between 1979 and 1983. And there's a lot of photos. That's all the ones that are me and my siblings fall in that timeframe. So they got a lot of my parents' money. Well, basically my mom's money. So I just went into my closet, got my box of photos out. I'm looking through these. There's no markings on them. There's no labels from who the companies were. I know you can't see them. That's me rubbing these old photos together. They are really well done. Granted, they've aged. These photos are over 40 years old and they've got very muted colors. I don't know if that's a product of the aging. But that Rembrandt Studios, CPI Corp, I'm almost positive that is the ones that took these photos. Any of you out there who, I would say you have to be older than me, that had kids back then, is that the company? If you lived in New England, the Northeast, where you brought your kids to get the professional photos, do you have any horror stories from trying to get those done? Or if you remember getting them taken of you, I don't know if I was good at sitting for photos. In the photos, it looks great. I'm all smiles. But I don't know if the photographer had to squeeze a rubber duck or bribe me with candy after. That idea, though, of department store photo studios, that caught on. And by the late 1980s, they had them in Walmart, JCPenney, Kmart. I would think with the advent of digital cameras, or at least when they became more readily available late 90s into the early 2000s, that seems to be when these professional studios started to go under. Because with digital cameras, you just take a photo and you can see right away if it's good. So you can just keep taking them until you get it right, just like with a smartphone. Oh, but there's one more photography studio that I could not do this segment and not talk about.

Speaker 01:

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Speaker 00:

Any of you that grew up in the 80s and 90s remember Glamour Shots? These were located in a lot of malls. I'm almost positive there was one in the Cape Cod Mall at one point because I think one of my sisters had some of these done. These were basically where you would go in, just a regular person, usually younger women, middle-aged women, and get to kind of dress up in costumes. These were more PG rated rather than the boudoir photos. If you know things like that, if you know what boudoir photos are, professional photos, usually of the wife in sexy clothes to give to the husband. Those are way more intimate photos. That's not what Glamour Shots was. Although I guess the idea for someone to go in and get dressed up in costume They want to look good. And, you know, you'd want these photos to give to your significant other. Or, I don't know, just to have. This was more of a female thing, so I have no idea of the ins and outs of glamour shots. I know that you had usually six different choices. There was a shots guide, so you could look through and see what you could choose for costumes. There were different outfits. Jackets, bustiers, dresses, leather jackets... And it was all from the waist up. So any accessories you had, you could come in with sweatpants, but have a leather jacket on top and that's all you'd see. There would be different filters on the camera. So any wrinkles or blemishes would be hidden. All this was $29.95. Makeup artists, they were part of the staff. It's almost like Photoshop, where you take a picture of yourself and you can use the filters to make yourself look younger, younger. And of course, back then in the 80s into the early 90s, the women that went in were encouraged to poof up their hair as much as they could. In doing my research, I saw that I keep saying Glamour Shots was a female thing. It says that men made up just 5% of the Glamour Shots customer base. At its peak in the mid-90s, Glamour Shots had over 350 stores located in malls. They lasted until recently. Although by 2019, there were only five glamour shots left. Did any of you female listeners go to glamour shots? And what was your experience like with them? I read that some teenage girls went there to try to get their makeup done for the prom at a reasonable price, but that the makeup was like theater or stage makeup. So it was weird and thick. And if you sweat, it would come off. I couldn't end this segment without talking about one of my favorite photos of all time that I have. And I think I love it a lot because my nieces love it a lot and they laugh at it. It is so quintessentially 80s and it's from that Rembrandt Studios, Sears Photo Studios. This photo is probably from 1981 or 82 because my sister Kate would have been likely three years old. So I'm probably five. And she's fully lit up, looking straight ahead, all dressed nice. And then in the background, I'm like Emperor Palpatine turned sideways. So it's a profile shot and I'm sort of fully lit, but sort of not. And I'm just looking in the other direction. It's very artsy, but it's so funny and so 80s. I like the photo so much because my niece is specifically my niece. Emma thinks it's the funniest thing she's ever seen. And we always have to tell her that we didn't choose to be shot like that. I don't know if the photographer said to my mom, like, ooh, you want to try something cool? Let's do this type of photo. It's not as funny as laser photos for me from sixth and seventh grade, but it is still pretty funny. Professional portrait photography inside a department store, inside a mall. Boy, that is a very 80s thing to say, an 80s thing to have done. And even though I joke and say that it's something that wasn't great about the 80s, I'm here looking at these photos now and just loving that they got done. Do any of you have memories of the Sears Portrait Studio or the other ones, Olin Mills or Glamour Shots? If you grew up, you know, more recently, you missed out on something really special and really unique back then. Until next time, though, that's going to wrap up episode 140 of the In My Footsteps podcast. Thank you to all of you who tune in, who make this appointment listening. I do put a lot of work into all of these episodes with research, with recording it, editing, marketing. And I hope you've enjoyed this crossover into more nostalgia. And I'm going to keep the nostalgia going next week with episode 141. I'm going to do my first full-length movie review. This is a special thing. I won't be doing it all the time, but I have to review the Winnebago Man documentary. It's from 2010. If you don't know Winnebago Man, I would say just go on YouTube and type that in and just enjoy. It's centered around a series of outtakes from a Winnebago commercial shoot in 1989 and the man who's the pitch man being so angry and swearing and yelling at everyone. And they made a documentary about trying to find him years later. So I'm going to talk about that movie. We're going to look at some of the most popular board games of the 1980s, forgotten 1970s cartoons. Man, it's nostalgia. I love it. I love sharing that stuff because it brings up good memories for me from being a kid, which it's always good to have those when you're staring down the barrel of 50. But all that stuff's coming up next week on episode 141 of the podcast. Follow me all over social media, Instagram, threads, X, subscribe to my YouTube channel. Full-length episodes of the podcast go up there. It's the audio on YouTube. It's replaced Google Podcasts, essentially. I've also got video segments from the podcast. I'm trying to do more travel videos like I did when I first started my YouTube channel. But that also requires travel. And there's only so many hours in the day. So I'm going to try to do more of those over the summer. Visit my website, ChristopherSetterlin.com. It's got links to all nine of my books. You can also find them in all local bookstores, Cape Cod, Southeastern New England, online, Amazon. Visit TheLadyOfTheDunes.com, the website that I built that features Frank Durant's amazing documentary about the now 50-year-old infamous Cape Cod murder case. It's also got links to my Searching for the Lady of the Dunes book that's the companion to the documentary, as well as a lot of newspaper stories from the time of the murder up to recently. If you're in the area, a few days after this podcast goes live, I will be talking about The Lady of the Dunes at the Dennis Public Library. That's in Dennisport. It's on April 20th, 11 a.m., If you can't make that one, I've got another Lady of the Dunes event coming up May 24th at the West Dennis Library at 1pm. And I'll keep updating as I add more and more events, because as summer goes, I've got a lot of places reaching out. So hopefully I'll have more events to share with you as the weeks and months come. I'd be remiss if I didn't end this podcast with a special shoutout that the person probably will never hear. I wanted to send a special birthday wish to Wendy. 20 years after we first met, I still can remember your birthday. Everybody's got someone in their life that changed their life for the better in ways you may not realize at the time when you met them. Or maybe you are lucky and you do know that. Some people come and change your life like a flash, like a supernova, and then they're gone. I don't want to dig too deep into our relationship. Obviously it was special if I'm shouting her out, but I'll just say everything that I'm doing now, writing all of this, it stems from her and the positive impact that she made on my life. And it's amazing. I can trace all of it back to Wendy and meeting her 20 years ago. And just by pure luck that we met and I haven't, seen her, spoken to her in going on 18 years now, but I'll never ever forget her and the impact she made on me and my life. So maybe someday she'll hear this, but if not, I'm very happy to wish her a happy birthday and just thank you for what you did for me and my life. And we'll wrap up on that. Just remember, in this life, don't walk in anyone else's footsteps. Create your own path and enjoy every moment you can because you never know what tomorrow brings. Thank you so much, everybody, for tuning in, for listening, for sharing, reviewing all of it. I can't do this without you. I appreciate all of you. This has been the In My Footsteps podcast. I am Christopher Setterlund. You already knew that. And I'll talk to you all again soon.

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