AADL Argus Oral History: Milton Campbell

Wed, 11/29/2017 - 1:13pm

When: 2017 at Downtown Library: Conference Room A

Transcript

• [00:00:00.87] SPEAKER: We're talking to Milt Campbell today. And, Milt, please state and spell out your full name.
• [00:00:04.75] MILTON CAMPBELL: It's Milt, or Milton Campbell. And that's M-I-L-T-O-N, C-A-M-P-B-E-L-L.
• [00:00:14.35] SPEAKER: Thanks. And where and when were you born, Milt?
• [00:00:17.63] MILTON CAMPBELL: I was born on November 30 1935, in Annandale, Minnesota.
• [00:00:24.46] SPEAKER: And where did you grow up?
• [00:00:26.68] MILTON CAMPBELL: Several places. I spent the first five years in Minnesota, then moved to Michigan during the war, because my dad worked at one of the factories for war material in Detroit. And I stayed in Detroit for five years, and had a lot of riots and stuff, and my mom was really worried about everything, so my dad purchased a house in Berkeley.
• [00:00:59.29] And we lived in Berkeley for four years, and then he decided he wanted to go back to farming like he was in Minnesota, and we moved out to Acreville, which is near Lake St. Clair.
• [00:01:19.73] SPEAKER: Oh, OK.
• [00:01:21.18] MILTON CAMPBELL: And we farmed there for a few years. And probably in 1950, we moved to just outside of Ann Arbor on a farm. And then about five years later, we moved to Dexter.
• [00:01:47.56] SPEAKER: Was he still farming in Dexter, then?
• [00:01:48.94] MILTON CAMPBELL: No, he quit farming and went into the real estate business.
• [00:01:57.43] SPEAKER: Did you go to high school in Dexter, then?
• [00:01:59.71] MILTON CAMPBELL: The last two years I went to Dexter High School.
• [00:02:03.58] SPEAKER: And what level education have you completed?
• [00:02:05.97] MILTON CAMPBELL: That's it--
• [00:02:06.52] SPEAKER: High school.
• [00:02:07.01] MILTON CAMPBELL: High school, yeah.
• [00:02:07.96] SPEAKER: Did you receive any kind of training, electrical or mechanics or like, lens-grinding, anything like that at all?
• [00:02:14.86] MILTON CAMPBELL: No.
• [00:02:15.07] SPEAKER: No. Did you serve in the military?
• [00:02:17.56] MILTON CAMPBELL: No.
• [00:02:19.30] SPEAKER: What is your marital status?
• [00:02:23.02] MILTON CAMPBELL: What is it now?
• [00:02:23.78] SPEAKER: And talk about it, you know-- yeah, yeah.
• [00:02:26.38] MILTON CAMPBELL: I was married for 40 years and my wife passed away. I've been single since.
• [00:02:34.34] SPEAKER: And you have three children?
• [00:02:36.67] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yes
• [00:02:37.21] MILTON CAMPBELL: And their names-- talk about them a little bit.
• [00:02:40.27] MILTON CAMPBELL: Well, my oldest, Verne, he had a gas station in Chelsea for quite a few number of years. Then he finally sold that and now he just runs a car wash out on South Industrial.
• [00:02:58.43] SPEAKER: OK.
• [00:02:59.87] MILTON CAMPBELL: And my daughter, she works at the U of M hospital. And then my youngest son, he's a furniture designer. And he lives in Traverse City and he has a store up there. And he's still designing furniture. .
• [00:03:15.52] SPEAKER: Yeah, I noticed in the Argus Eyes, a couple of your children's births were announced in the Argus Eyes, the company newsletter.
• [00:03:22.10] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yeah.
• [00:03:24.15] SPEAKER: Where do you currently reside?
• [00:03:26.64] MILTON CAMPBELL: I spent 50-some years out at Silver Lake.
• [00:03:32.55] SPEAKER: In Dexter?
• [00:03:33.96] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yes. Mm-hmm.
• [00:03:36.03] SPEAKER: A lot of Silver Lakes around here.
• [00:03:38.87] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yes, a lot of people get mixed up when you mention Silver Lake.
• [00:03:43.70] SPEAKER: What was your primary occupation?
• [00:03:46.91] MILTON CAMPBELL: Well, I spent all the younger years at Argus. I started at Argus right out of high school. I stayed there until I moved away. And I commuted for a couple of years to different places for Argus, and then when we started our own business in Dexter. We ended up with five different stores. We service cameras and sold cameras. Sold thousands of cameras, I should say.
• [00:04:20.99] SPEAKER: We'll get back to here on cameras in a little bit, but how did you first learn about Argus?
• [00:04:27.71] MILTON CAMPBELL: I had friends that had worked at Argue, and they really said it was a very nice place to work. And when I applied there, they hired me right away. I worked in the Service Department all throughout the entire thing. I started at the bottom end, which was just focusing cameras, because we serviced at that time probably 100 cameras a day or something like that for Argus.
• [00:05:00.78] SPEAKER: What year did you start at Argus? What years did you work there?
• [00:05:03.32] MILTON CAMPBELL: From '53 till 1970.
• [00:05:09.38] SPEAKER: So you started off focusing on the lens focusing--
• [00:05:13.36] MILTON CAMPBELL: Right.
• [00:05:13.73] SPEAKER: And then where did you go from there?
• [00:05:15.12] MILTON CAMPBELL: Well, that only lasted a couple of months, and then they put me on starting to repair some of the cameras, and then I got where I could repair all of them. So I any time they needed extra help I could repair any camera that came into the place.
• [00:05:32.45] SPEAKER: Were there any particular cameras that had more problems than others?
• [00:05:37.36] MILTON CAMPBELL: Well, we've run into a problem with-- all different models had lots of problems, it's like a car having a defect in it. But we would service sometimes it would be all one model for a while, and then it would be another model.
• [00:05:58.31] SPEAKER: Any particular problems you could recall that were for different models? A lot of the people that collect them like to know the details of how to repair, what have been issues, and that kind of thing.
• [00:06:12.77] MILTON CAMPBELL: The low-end ones were hardly worth repairing. But when you got into like the Argus C3 and the Argus C4 and C44, they had problems with the oil leaking down onto the shutter blades. And then they'd stick, and it would break the toggle and the drive spring. It was no big problem servicing them, because they were pretty basic cameras.
• [00:06:46.12] SPEAKER: Any camera in particular that sticks out that was more durable or more reliable than other models?
• [00:06:53.21] MILTON CAMPBELL: Well, probably the Argos C3 was the most reliable that they ever built. But they made several million of them, so--
• [00:07:01.61] SPEAKER: Yeah, that's true. Can you recall the time when they had a major problem on the C4 line, and you had to work with the line problem?
• [00:07:12.68] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yes.
• [00:07:13.39] SPEAKER: Do you want to talk about that a little bit?
• [00:07:15.36] MILTON CAMPBELL: Well, they were building them and they ran into a lot of problems when they had several hundred of them that were backed up [INAUDIBLE]. They didn't pass inspection. And the repairman they had there could only do maybe 15 to 20 a day. And they wanted to know if I'd mind going up and helping him out. So I went up there and I had many shortcuts to figure out what to do, how to repair, so I could do like 50 to his 20. He got so he could do it, too, after I showed the secrets of getting them apart and stuff.
• [00:07:56.98] SPEAKER: So your work mostly entailed just-- was it new cameras off the line that you fixed or cameras that people sent in for repair?
• [00:08:05.20] MILTON CAMPBELL: Normally, it was just the ones that they sent in, but when I helped on the line that was all new cameras.
• [00:08:10.18] SPEAKER: OK.
• [00:08:10.92] MILTON CAMPBELL: But when people sent them in we would go through them all and just make them like new again. Because all the leather was stripped off in order to open them up, and we would service them and make them like new, and we had some ladies there that would re-leather them so they looked like brand-new when they went out of there.
• [00:08:37.62] SPEAKER: What kind of warranty did the company have? Well, they supposedly had a lifetime warranty, which actually is not a person's lifetime, It's the lifetime of the camera. But many people asked for it. And we were very lenient on it-- on the warranty, so many of them got fixed for no charge.
• [00:09:02.47] SPEAKER: Do you think that was one of the selling points to the Argus cameras?
• [00:09:05.39] MILTON CAMPBELL: That was a-- all the sales people for Argue always said it was the Service Department that made easy sales because our average backlog when you sent a camera in for repairs was like two weeks. And they'd get the camera back.
• [00:09:20.68] SPEAKER: A brand new camera, basically.
• [00:09:21.98] MILTON CAMPBELL: Basically, right. It looked like brand new.
• [00:09:27.41] SPEAKER: So you didn't repair movie cameras or slide projectors, you just were the camera person, on the camera people.
• [00:09:33.21] MILTON CAMPBELL: Well, at first. But when I got into any other things, I became a Service Editor, which I would write down-- we'd go through the camera and see whether it was going to be under warranty, if it was going to be-- what it actually needed. And actually if it needed parts and everything, it would be all out before the camera was repaired. And that was everything-- if it was a camera, or projector.
• [00:10:05.03] SPEAKER: OK.
• [00:10:08.21] MILTON CAMPBELL: They all went through myself and one other person that was a Service Editor.
• [00:10:15.11] SPEAKER: Any of those projectors or movie cameras that come to mind that were better than others, or had more issues than others, or any ones that were a failure.
• [00:10:25.04] MILTON CAMPBELL: Some of the very first movie projectors were a disaster. They used this transmission thing and it had rubber tires on them, and those rubber tires would stick together. And they made several thousand of them, and they were all bad. And it was really costly for Argus because we ended up fixing all those at no charge.
• [00:10:53.31] SPEAKER: Any other particular stories about the products you worked with that come to mind that people will appreciate hearing about?
• [00:11:03.02] MILTON CAMPBELL: Well, as a rule, mostly, most of the cameras and projectors and everything were really very reliable, and took very nice pictures compared to everything else. Like Kodak used to say, that brick that Argus made made 35 millimeter film. They were speaking of the C3, because there were so many of them built.
• [00:11:25.72] SPEAKER: Yeah.
• [00:11:30.02] MILTON CAMPBELL: Almost all the cameras were good. Very few of them that weren't.
• [00:11:36.95] SPEAKER: On just kind of a side note, do you know anything about the Black C411? Members are curious about that. It was a military camera, or just why were only a few of them made?
• [00:11:48.85] MILTON CAMPBELL: Well, they had contracts like the military has contracts for so many things, but the Black C3 and the Black C4--
• [00:11:59.90] SPEAKER: Black C4, yeah.
• [00:12:01.43] MILTON CAMPBELL: And those were-- they had more waterproof parts in them which if they got in damp conditions they wouldn't freeze up like a regular camera, they had copper-plated different parts inside.
• [00:12:19.29] SPEAKER: So was it for the military, then?
• [00:12:21.39] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yes.
• [00:12:21.61] SPEAKER: They were.
• [00:12:22.00] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yup.
• [00:12:23.73] SPEAKER: They were. All right, well, that's always been a question. And what I got you here, too, just really quickly, where I have any of these pictures, do you recognize anything about any of these kind of very unusual Argus products.
• [00:12:42.10] MILTON CAMPBELL: This one here was just strictly-- it was never produced, it was just--
• [00:12:48.24] SPEAKER: Hold it up, if you can. Yeah.
• [00:12:50.04] MILTON CAMPBELL: It was never produced, it was just a prototype. They probably only made a few of them. That's the same thing with this one, they just made a few.
• [00:13:05.56] SPEAKER: That's why there's only a few around.
• [00:13:07.21] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yup, that's why there's very few.
• [00:13:09.80] SPEAKER: I've got those two. We were talking about the C5 and the Stereo Camera, the first two.
• [00:13:20.75] MILTON CAMPBELL: You have the-- these were all just prototypes. This one I think was a prototype for the A4, which they made quite a few thousands of the A4s, but that's what that one-- it just had a different shutter on it than what-- this was an imported shutter from, I think, Germany.
• [00:13:48.01] SPEAKER: That's the A5, right?
• [00:13:49.54] MILTON CAMPBELL: Probably, an A5. Yes.
• [00:13:51.06] SPEAKER: Yeah.
• [00:13:52.08] MILTON CAMPBELL: But that never into production, but it looked just like the A4 with a different shutter on the front of it.
• [00:13:59.55] SPEAKER: OK, so good to know. Because they had advertisements made for these things.
• [00:14:08.60] MILTON CAMPBELL: The museum doesn't have any of those in--
• [00:14:11.12] SPEAKER: No. Nope.
• [00:14:13.57] MILTON CAMPBELL: Well, Don Wallace, when he bought-- I had several of those and I sold them to Don Wallace. And he probably sold them to other people before--
• [00:14:20.09] SPEAKER: Darn it.
• [00:14:21.10] MILTON CAMPBELL: Before for the--
• [00:14:22.27] SPEAKER: Before the museum was founded. So you worked there during the Sylvania years and Mansfield years too, right?
• [00:14:31.33] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yes.
• [00:14:32.71] SPEAKER: Was the service department-- did it change? Did you have the same warranty-- the same kind of policies?
• [00:14:38.14] MILTON CAMPBELL: Actually we were more lenient when Sylvania took over. Sylvania was a great company. Argus did very well with them because they were into-- we sold flash bulbs, light bulbs for projectors and everything. But when-- General Telephone wanted Automatic Electric, Sylvania wouldn't sell it to them.
• [00:15:13.17] SPEAKER: Oh.
• [00:15:14.46] MILTON CAMPBELL: And so they said, well, we'll get it. So they bought the whole thing. They bought Argus and--
• [00:15:22.21] SPEAKER: Sylvania. That's why GTE bought that. Oh! Really, I didn't know that either.
• [00:15:26.61] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yep. It was all when General Telephone wanted that, that's why they ended up with it. And they closed off 22 plants around the country that Sylvania ran. And closed them up and gave the buildings to universities for write-off.
• [00:15:50.20] SPEAKER: Same with Argus then too.
• [00:15:51.64] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yep. Argus was gone. And when they sold Argus to Mansfield-- or General Telephone sold Argus to Mansfield Industries-- that was a disaster.
• [00:16:01.79] SPEAKER: Why is that?
• [00:16:02.75] MILTON CAMPBELL: Well, they said that they had people that could repair any camera and learn how to repair it in two weeks time down in Chicago. And that's when they wanted to move everything down here. And when they did that, they let all of us go at the Argus service center.
• [00:16:19.67] SPEAKER: It was 1970?
• [00:16:21.32] MILTON CAMPBELL: It was before that.
• [00:16:24.47] SPEAKER: OK.
• [00:16:25.39] MILTON CAMPBELL: That was in '64 or '64.
• [00:16:29.26] SPEAKER: OK. Yeah. But you worked to Argus until 1970, didn't you?
• [00:16:34.45] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yes, that was the last year I worked for them.
• [00:16:36.01] SPEAKER: So what did you do after they closed the service department then?
• [00:16:38.74] MILTON CAMPBELL: Well, I commuted to Chicago. A
• [00:16:40.87] SPEAKER: Oh.
• [00:16:43.03] MILTON CAMPBELL: After I was laid off, they called up two weeks later and they said, they wanted to know if I could come down to Chicago to help them. And I went in that building down there, and they had thousands and thousands of packages there unopened with cameras.
• [00:16:57.31] SPEAKER: Oh, jeez.
• [00:16:57.79] MILTON CAMPBELL: Well, there was a dealer that sent in a camera for repair, he never got it back for six months. And that killed the sales for Argus. For one thing the salesman couldn't sell an Argus because they couldn't get the cameras repaired.
• [00:17:15.81] When went down there to help them out it was a disaster. The building they had was in a big warehouse building, and the warehouse people were working in there. They would throw boxes of cameras out the window to somebody who's outside so they could--
• [00:17:36.04] SPEAKER: Oh, jeez. That like a real disaster. That wasn't customer service was it?
• [00:17:42.74] MILTON CAMPBELL: No, that was not.
• [00:17:44.37] SPEAKER: So really when GTE bought them there was a downfall, but when GTE sold it to Mansfield, that was kind of--
• [00:17:48.62] MILTON CAMPBELL: That was it.
• [00:17:49.14] SPEAKER: That was it.
• [00:17:49.98] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yep. That killed the Argus. But somebody else bought-- I don't remember the name of who bought them after Mansfield didn't make it. And they were bringing in cameras too from Japan, and they were really, really bad cameras. Some of the Mansfield movie cameras were unbelievably bad. And they had so many faults with them and I would have-- it wasn't uncommon to repair like 50 of them in a day, just myself.
• [00:18:25.97] SPEAKER: Oh, jeez.
• [00:18:27.98] MILTON CAMPBELL: But they had several people from Japan there and everything, trying to do it. In fact, I got a job of taking care of four Japanese guys that were in from Japan, and they would come in the morning. I'd pick them up at her hotel and bring them into work. And if they were five minutes late they were really, really upset. They would be shaking they were so scared-- that there were five minutes late.
• [00:18:59.98] SPEAKER: Wow.
• [00:19:01.39] MILTON CAMPBELL: And same thing at lunchtime. You had to take them to lunch and get them a lunch. And they were always so nervous, because at home they had to be-- everything had to be-- exact time. But anyway, I'd have to see that they were back to the hotel at night and different things.
• [00:19:23.41] SPEAKER: How long would that go on for?
• [00:19:25.38] MILTON CAMPBELL: I was down there for probably two years.
• [00:19:28.70] SPEAKER: Wow.
• [00:19:29.58] MILTON CAMPBELL: Flying home every Friday night and coming back Monday morning.
• [00:19:33.84] SPEAKER: Well, that must have been a hectic lifestyle.
• [00:19:36.45] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yes. And then I told them I wasn't going to come down there anymore, And they wanted to know if I could help them out some other way. So I said, well, give me some of my repairmen back that I had at Argus and we would start a little group. And so I had like five or six repairmen that used to work in the Argus service center, and we were doing servicing more with five and six people as they were with 25 and 30 people down there.
• [00:20:13.70] SPEAKER: Where did you work? Where was the room at-- the office at back here?
• [00:20:18.54] MILTON CAMPBELL: It was in the building number one in the Argus buildings, because they had moved. They were still manufacturing.
• [00:20:27.72] SPEAKER: OK, the Argus I building. The building the museum is in now.
• [00:20:30.75] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yes.
• [00:20:31.21] SPEAKER: What floor were you? Where were you at in that building?
• [00:20:35.17] MILTON CAMPBELL: Oh no, it wasn't Building I it was Building III.
• [00:20:37.35] SPEAKER: Building III.
• [00:20:37.93] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yeah.
• [00:20:38.32] SPEAKER: OK.
• [00:20:38.86] MILTON CAMPBELL: Across the street from I.
• [00:20:40.30] SPEAKER: OK. That was II.
• [00:20:41.72] MILTON CAMPBELL: II, yeah.
• [00:20:42.57] SPEAKER: II?
• [00:20:43.00] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yeah.
• [00:20:43.67] SPEAKER: OK, the building II across the street. Where were you at there then?
• [00:20:48.31] MILTON CAMPBELL: It was just inside of, not very far inside. I don't remember.
• [00:20:53.98] SPEAKER: Where was the repair rooms at when you first start working for Argus then?
• [00:20:59.41] MILTON CAMPBELL: Well we started on the fourth floor building number I.
• [00:21:01.99] SPEAKER: OK.
• [00:21:02.47] MILTON CAMPBELL: And then we'd outgrown it, and so they purchased the old brewery building and the service center took over the brewery building. We had repairs up on the top floor for cameras and such and first floor for projectors.
• [00:21:25.27] SPEAKER: So what year were you at the brewery then? The brewery building? Approximately?
• [00:21:34.04] MILTON CAMPBELL: I think we were in that building from '58 until '62.
• [00:21:41.44] SPEAKER: And then you went to Chicago for a couple of years and then came back. And then you went to the Argus II building.
• [00:21:46.15] MILTON CAMPBELL: Right
• [00:21:46.72] SPEAKER: And then, how many years were you working there?
• [00:21:50.62] MILTON CAMPBELL: Well, they decided move everything down to South Carolina.
• [00:21:53.83] SPEAKER: Oh, that's right. And what year was that?
• [00:22:01.74] MILTON CAMPBELL: Probably '60--
• [00:22:06.64] SPEAKER: Late '60s huh?
• [00:22:07.54] MILTON CAMPBELL: Late '60s. Yeah, so probably '67 or '68, somewhere in there.
• [00:22:11.36] SPEAKER: Did you go to South Carolina then?
• [00:22:13.51] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yes.
• [00:22:13.87] SPEAKER: You did? OK.
• [00:22:15.24] MILTON CAMPBELL: I flew down to South Carolina and tried to setup a service center down there for them. And that was just about as bad as Chicago. Down there the problem was that I had 30 people working for me and probably half of them you would have to go look for every little while, because they would be sleeping somewhere.
• [00:22:38.82] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:22:41.71] But it was-- the people were just different. They weren't used to sitting down and working a full day. And
• [00:22:50.77] SPEAKER: So when you started at Argus, who did you work with?
• [00:22:55.18] MILTON CAMPBELL: Well, my boss was Doc Benson on the fourth floor up there. And then he left after a year or so because he was retiring. But he was a very strict manager. Everybody said, oh, you can't work for him, he's really bad. But I got along with a well. And then Jim Rohrbaugh took his place. I worked for Jim for several years. And then when Jim left, my direct boss was Alex [? Gazel. ?] Which he worked at-- after Argus moved away and everything he worked at the optics plant.
• [00:23:39.61] SPEAKER: OK. Where was the optics plant located?
• [00:23:43.28] MILTON CAMPBELL: It was on South State Street. Argus had a big warehouse building out there.
• [00:23:49.92] SPEAKER: South state and what's the crossroads in that area? That's all right, you don't have to tell me, I just thought you might know. Now, did a lot of Argus go to Chicago then with you?
• [00:24:01.20] MILTON CAMPBELL: Oh there was only three or four.
• [00:24:04.60] SPEAKER: Do remember anybody's names?
• [00:24:08.10] MILTON CAMPBELL: Dick Keaton is one. Boy, I don't remember.
• [00:24:15.32] SPEAKER: Katie Keaton was his wife, right?
• [00:24:16.78] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yes.
• [00:24:17.02] SPEAKER: Yes. And she worked for Argus also.
• [00:24:19.75] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yes.
• [00:24:20.89] SPEAKER: And then when you came back up here and you got your own little group together again, who did you get together to work back in Ann Arbor?
• [00:24:32.15] MILTON CAMPBELL: Well, I had some of the newer people that came in just the last few months. There was Robert Klaus, Jerry Schmidt, and Dick Keaton. I'm trying to remember who else there was, but I can't think of their names right now.
• [00:24:56.91] SPEAKER: It's all right. Did anybody go with you to South Carolina then?
• [00:25:00.89] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yes there was a couple of engineers I used to go down with. Boy, I can't remember their names.
• [00:25:10.34] SPEAKER: If it comes to you while we're talking, but no big deal. And then I'm going back to beginning. This is my fault, but who did you hire in with? Was there anybody that you hung out with when you first were hired at Argus?
• [00:25:21.68] MILTON CAMPBELL: Not particularly.
• [00:25:22.83] SPEAKER: No? No.
• [00:25:24.70] MILTON CAMPBELL: It was a big people-- there was 1,300 people working at Argus at that time.
• [00:25:28.42] SPEAKER: Yeah.
• [00:25:28.93] MILTON CAMPBELL: It was a big company.
• [00:25:31.46] SPEAKER: So you worked alone mostly? Did you work in teams or alone? Or?
• [00:25:35.40] MILTON CAMPBELL: Usually, most of the time, it was just alone. You had each person had their own job to do.
• [00:25:43.78] SPEAKER: Were you in cubicles? Or a lot of people in the same room?
• [00:25:46.76] MILTON CAMPBELL: They were in almost an assembly line.
• [00:25:50.91] SPEAKER: OK.
• [00:25:53.49] MILTON CAMPBELL: And then we had special ladies that inspected cameras. Some would re-leather them and make them look like new. And then final cleaning and bag them up at the end.
• [00:26:07.14] SPEAKER: So were there a lot of women working at the factory at this time when you started?
• [00:26:11.54] MILTON CAMPBELL: In the whole factory you mean? Oh, probably 60% women.
• [00:26:16.08] SPEAKER: Now was that continued throughout your career at Argus? Was there always a large percentage of women.
• [00:26:22.01] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yes.
• [00:26:22.41] SPEAKER: Yes.
• [00:26:24.37] MILTON CAMPBELL: Back one time I almost got laid off because there were different parts of company getting laying off people. And they used your hire-in date. And whoever has the lowest rate, somebody else could come and bump you and take your job.
• [00:26:41.36] Well, that happened to me two or three times. One time they sent me over, and I was a supervisor over the warehouse with women on State Street where they packaged the cameras, shipped them out. I had nothing but women there. There were 30 women out there. And I was only a 25-year-old.
• [00:27:06.08] SPEAKER: You're in over your head, huh?
• [00:27:08.93] MILTON CAMPBELL: Oh, I didn't know how to end the fights they had, pulling each other's hair and different things.
• [00:27:16.87] SPEAKER: Oh, my goodness.
• [00:27:19.83] MILTON CAMPBELL: But I survived, but I told my previous boss and I said that I was going to leave, and they said, oh, don't do that. So they made a temporary position for me back in service center-- service department. And I was temporary ever after that.
• [00:27:41.41] SPEAKER: Oh, were you really always temporary?
• [00:27:43.55] MILTON CAMPBELL: That's what my title said, temporary. But they didn't want me to leave, because I was-- I guess they felt I was very important or something.
• [00:27:52.57] SPEAKER: How was the safety and security working in the factories? Were there any issues with safety or security?
• [00:27:57.97] MILTON CAMPBELL: No. Argus was a good place to work. There were no safety concerns or anything.
• [00:28:07.98] SPEAKER: Did you have any relatives that worked for Argus?
• [00:28:10.52] MILTON CAMPBELL: No.
• [00:28:10.98] SPEAKER: No. And so did you have any close friends throughout your years at Argus?
• [00:28:17.52] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yes, the fella I went and helped, Robert Camburn, he worked in the Argus C4 line. After they got that situation straightened out there, I talked him into coming and work in the service department. We were always very close friends. We had lunch together. Every day we would walk up to Main Street. Every day we had a half hour for lunch, so we walked up to Main Street, had lunch, walked back in half an hour.
• [00:28:51.60] SPEAKER: Oh, wow. That's a quick walk.
• [00:28:53.16] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yeah. We had long legs, and that was good exercise.
• [00:28:56.57] SPEAKER: So you drove to work then. You weren't living close enough that you could walk?
• [00:29:00.27] MILTON CAMPBELL: No.
• [00:29:00.37] SPEAKER: You drove from Dexter? Are you from Dexter?
• [00:29:02.07] MILTON CAMPBELL: I lived out at Silver Lake.
• [00:29:03.18] SPEAKER: OK, you did. OK. All right.
• [00:29:04.11] MILTON CAMPBELL: That was 18 miles.
• [00:29:08.30] SPEAKER: And the management treated its employees well-- you felt that the Argus managers treated all their?
• [00:29:13.81] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yes. They were very good managers, except the last boss I had there, he-- if you suggested something-- would always make it the opposite. If I had asked him if this should be done at no charge, or should we give this person something, he'd make it the opposite. So if you said, well, we should charge this guy, he would say, no, do that at no charge.
• [00:29:34.80] SPEAKER: So you knew how to work.
• [00:29:36.14] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yeah. So that happened for several years.
• [00:29:40.77] SPEAKER: Now, did you participate in any of the Argus activities, and of the clubs, or any of the parties. I know they had the Christmas parties for kids.
• [00:29:49.59] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yes, they had a Christmas party for kids. They would also-- out to the lake-- they had a--
• [00:29:57.69] SPEAKER: Independence Lake?
• [00:29:58.32] MILTON CAMPBELL: Independence Lake. They had a place there, and we'd go out in the springtime and clean it up. And I helped on that all the time too.
• [00:30:08.22] SPEAKER: Did you camp there at all?
• [00:30:09.63] MILTON CAMPBELL: No. I didn't go swim there either, because every spring they always had swimmer's itch out there, which was really bad. So I didn't even take my children out because we had a clean lake Silver Lake.
• [00:30:21.00] SPEAKER: Right. Yes. So did you belong to any of the clubs or any other teams?
• [00:30:26.31] MILTON CAMPBELL: No.
• [00:30:26.61] SPEAKER: No. So did you eat in the cafeteria very often?
• [00:30:34.27] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yes, most of the time.
• [00:30:35.95] SPEAKER: How was the food there?
• [00:30:37.51] MILTON CAMPBELL: It was very good and very reasonable. You could get a nice lunch for very little.
• [00:30:46.75] SPEAKER: And did you win any awards at all for the company? I have one here. I got to look for it though, because I not keeping up with my notes. I saw that you won a suggestion award. And you went $218.11 for your award.
• [00:31:02.77] MILTON CAMPBELL: Well, actually I had a few others, but some of them would have been thousands, but somebody else turned it in in front of me.
• [00:31:08.74] SPEAKER: Oh, really?
• [00:31:10.51] MILTON CAMPBELL: Alex-- not, Alex. Ed Nimke.
• [00:31:17.13] SPEAKER: Oh, I remember--
• [00:31:18.00] MILTON CAMPBELL: I found this-- one camera came in, an Argus C4 that had his toggle was broken, and somebody had made a toggle for it. And it was much better than Argus's toggle, because Argus's toggle was not near as neat and it eliminated two or three parts. Well, I showed it to Ed. I said, this is what Argus should do. Well, he knew what to do about it. I didn't. Anyway, he turned it in and he got quite a few thousand dollars for it.
• [00:31:48.61] SPEAKER: Did he really?
• [00:31:49.26] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yes.
• [00:31:50.80] SPEAKER: How do the suggestion awards work? You hand it to your supervisor, your suggestion?
• [00:31:55.92] MILTON CAMPBELL: They had a suggestion box. You'd turn it.
• [00:31:57.45] SPEAKER: Oh, a suggestion box you'd throw it in.
• [00:31:58.35] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yep.
• [00:31:59.11] SPEAKER: And then once a month they gave awards out, or?
• [00:32:02.04] MILTON CAMPBELL: I don't know how often they did it, but if they used your suggestion they paid you a certain amount for what you saved the company and everything.
• [00:32:13.26] SPEAKER: So do you remember what suggestion, the one you got that $218.11?
• [00:32:17.42] MILTON CAMPBELL: No, I don't remember. I turned in several others, but they didn't amount to much. The one for the Argus C4 toggle, I was really--
• [00:32:31.23] SPEAKER: A little bit upset?
• [00:32:32.66] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yes. Because I'm the one that repaired the camera that came in on and--
• [00:32:40.13] SPEAKER: And had the idea you should tell somebody about it.
• [00:32:42.53] MILTON CAMPBELL: Right. And I told Ed about it. I said, so what do you think about this? Isn't his neat? And, well--
• [00:32:48.02] SPEAKER: Well.
• [00:32:48.72] MILTON CAMPBELL: Ed had worked there for many, many years, so he knew exactly what to do with it.
• [00:32:52.66] SPEAKER: Make some money off it, yes. So do you think that was a good policy with the suggestion box?
• [00:32:59.05] MILTON CAMPBELL: Oh yes. They come up a lot of good ideas there.
• [00:33:05.44] SPEAKER: Where are we at here on my list. Now did your kids go to the Christmas party. Did you guys go to the Christmas parties? Or did you go also to their annual banquet they had?
• [00:33:17.74] MILTON CAMPBELL: I went to some of them. I didn't them to a lot of them. My children were so busy with other things, that I never got-- just one or two Christmas parties.
• [00:33:27.67] SPEAKER: And when you took vacations, did you take vacations with the friends from Argus to outside of Argus?
• [00:33:34.18] MILTON CAMPBELL: No.
• [00:33:34.51] SPEAKER: No. OK. Some people did that. I understand that. And the Argus Eyes, what was your feelings about the Argus Eyes, the company newsletter. Was there always a kind of excitement when it came out every month, to see who was in it and the stories of people? Or how do you feel about that?
• [00:33:51.46] MILTON CAMPBELL: I never got into that much, because I didn't do any of their outside activities that a lot of that was for.
• [00:33:59.84] SPEAKER: Yeah, and some company stuff. But probably knew about the company formation before it was out there anyways. And so tell me about how you left Argus, or why you left Argus.
• [00:34:11.56] MILTON CAMPBELL: Well, I was commuting to South Carolina. I'd already been down there for two years, flying home every week and everything, And I told them I couldn't do it anymore, It was too much trying to get down here. And so several of the people that I worked with decided we would go and start repairing cameras for Argus.
• [00:34:40.99] SPEAKER: So you started your company then?
• [00:34:42.58] MILTON CAMPBELL: Right.
• [00:34:43.91] SPEAKER: Well it started off as a camera repair company?
• [00:34:46.36] MILTON CAMPBELL: Right, exactly.
• [00:34:47.35] SPEAKER: Well what was it called?
• [00:34:48.74] MILTON CAMPBELL: It was Huron Camera. It was on Huron River Drive. It was in some of the old buildings where Argus was going to be. We rented one of those. And we call it Huron Camera.
• [00:35:03.47] SPEAKER: OK.
• [00:35:03.87] MILTON CAMPBELL: Huron Camera Service it was, because we were just doing the service.
• [00:35:08.76] SPEAKER: What year was that?
• [00:35:10.56] MILTON CAMPBELL: It was 1970.
• [00:35:11.94] SPEAKER: OK.
• [00:35:13.14] MILTON CAMPBELL: And they would send up truckloads of cameras-- semi-truck loads full of cameras for us to repair.
• [00:35:20.37] SPEAKER: Wow. How many people were working here at the time?
• [00:35:24.90] MILTON CAMPBELL: Well we started off with 10, I think.
• [00:35:33.14] SPEAKER: Were any of them former Argus employees too?
• [00:35:36.44] MILTON CAMPBELL: They were all Argus employees.
• [00:35:38.29] SPEAKER: Do you remember anybody's names that were there?
• [00:35:41.54] MILTON CAMPBELL: Well, there was Gerald Schmidt, Robert Klause, Ronald Dougherty, Dorothy Weir, Chuck Henshaw. There was one or two more. I can't think of--
• [00:36:02.12] SPEAKER: That's all right. Yeah. Well, you got them together, basically.
• [00:36:04.61] MILTON CAMPBELL: Right.
• [00:36:05.40] SPEAKER: And then who owned the company?
• [00:36:07.46] MILTON CAMPBELL: We were all partners.
• [00:36:08.66] SPEAKER: OK. All right.
• [00:36:10.53] MILTON CAMPBELL: But several of them wanted to leave after a year because we were breaking much money.
• [00:36:15.52] SPEAKER: Even with those semi-truck loads of cameras, you weren't making much money?
• [00:36:19.36] MILTON CAMPBELL: No, because we were doing a low rate for Argus.
• [00:36:24.95] SPEAKER: Were you still working for Argus basically though? Were you working for Mansfield?
• [00:36:29.48] MILTON CAMPBELL: No. It wasn't-- we were just doing this for Argus. Well it would have been Mansfield at the time, I think.
• [00:36:39.83] SPEAKER: Yeah.
• [00:36:40.81] MILTON CAMPBELL: Anyway, we were just billing them-- for a C3 we'd get about $10, or $8 or $10. And normally it would cost $20 to service one. No, we were just doing them at very low rate. Then as people got to know us, different camera companies-- because we would mail them back to the c camera companies who set them in Argus, a lot of them.
• [00:37:06.76] SPEAKER: OK.
• [00:37:06.85] MILTON CAMPBELL: Mail them back direct. Pretty soon we were getting more and more and more, that pretty soon we got up to where we were servicing about 400 cameras a month with 10 of us all total working in there. So that's how Huron Camera got to be. And then people kept coming in and wanting us to order cameras for them so we could sell them. And we started ordering cameras, and then we'd sell cameras to them wholesale.
• [00:37:39.03] SPEAKER: So this place kind of got the cameras out through the back door. You became a camera store, basically.
• [00:37:44.88] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yep.
• [00:37:45.72] SPEAKER: And then, when did you move to Dexter? Was there any place in between that you moved to Dexter?
• [00:37:52.16] MILTON CAMPBELL: No, we moved to here Huron River Drive with Argus and that's where we started our company there. We rented one of the buildings, and we were there two years on Huron River drive. And then we rented the old theater building in downtown Dexter, and we serviced cameras out if that. And then I think we were there three or four years and the Dancers Department Store in downtown Dexter was moving out, and we knew who owned it, and we ended up buying the building from that owner.
• [00:38:33.24] SPEAKER: So how many of you were partners at that time?
• [00:38:35.63] MILTON CAMPBELL: There was probably five or six. I don't remember exactly for sure.
• [00:38:42.44] SPEAKER: OK. Yeah. Quite a few partners.
• [00:38:44.40] MILTON CAMPBELL: And then we bought out three or four there. It ended up where there was just three of us were partners.
• [00:38:50.11] SPEAKER: Who were the three?
• [00:38:52.44] MILTON CAMPBELL: Myself, Robert [INAUDIBLE], and Gerald Schmidt.
• [00:38:55.14] SPEAKER: OK.
• [00:38:57.84] MILTON CAMPBELL: And then we ended up buying other stores. We bought one in Jackson. We bought one about the Battle Creek, from camera stores that were going out of business. And then we opened one in-- we bought the building in Saline and had one there. In then we rented a space in Chelsea and had a store there.
• [00:39:21.59] SPEAKER: So you had how many stores? You had five stores then?
• [00:39:23.07] MILTON CAMPBELL: Five stores.
• [00:39:24.04] SPEAKER: Wow. So you had quite a few employees then too.
• [00:39:27.27] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yes, there were lots of employees. Anyway, we'd process film too. We'd process 100 rolls a day at each of the other locations about, and probably 200 in Dexter.
• [00:39:40.86] SPEAKER: Wow. So how many years did you have all those stores then?
• [00:39:46.64] MILTON CAMPBELL: Well, up until I left-- and in fact we just sold the last one--
• [00:39:53.71] SPEAKER: Yeah.
• [00:39:54.70] MILTON CAMPBELL: This last year.
• [00:39:56.10] SPEAKER: So little by little, the stores were sold off then.
• [00:39:58.55] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yes. Mm-hm.
• [00:39:58.76] SPEAKER: And the last one was Dexter. And then you sold the one in Dexter to-- was that a nephew or something?
• [00:40:04.16] MILTON CAMPBELL: No.
• [00:40:04.40] SPEAKER: No.
• [00:40:04.58] MILTON CAMPBELL: It was a person. He wanted it, but he was never a business man, so.
• [00:40:13.10] SPEAKER: What year did you sell that to him? It's OK. You don't have to-- I probably have it somewhere in my notes too.
• [00:40:25.23] MILTON CAMPBELL: Well, we rented out the building in Saline until just this last year.
• [00:40:28.18] SPEAKER: Oh really?
• [00:40:29.43] MILTON CAMPBELL: We finally sold it.
• [00:40:33.70] SPEAKER: I know. It was a sad day when the Huron Camera in Dexter closed down. Everybody was so upset about that, because it was one of those legendary businesses in the village. And I know your Christmas village was legendary too.
• [00:40:48.66] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yes.
• [00:40:49.30] SPEAKER: There was how many built buildings did you have on that?
• [00:40:53.10] MILTON CAMPBELL: There was over about 350 houses and buildings, And then several hundred trees, and people, and cars, and trucks, and everything.
• [00:41:04.82] SPEAKER: How long did it take you to set that up every year?
• [00:41:06.56] MILTON CAMPBELL: It would take 350 hours to set it up.
• [00:41:08.92] SPEAKER: Wow.
• [00:41:10.22] MILTON CAMPBELL: And in fact, it was up at Gordon Hall.
• [00:41:15.43] SPEAKER: Yeah, in Dexter. Yes. They advertised that. Yes. Yes. They were really excited to have it there this holiday season.
• [00:41:21.63] MILTON CAMPBELL: Oh, yeah. We had 500 people come the first night-- or first day.
• [00:41:25.93] SPEAKER: Wow! Did you have the whole village there then too? Or?
• [00:41:30.14] MILTON CAMPBELL: I helped them for two or three days to show things went. And then I said, well, I'm going to leave it up to you guys to do the rest. Well, they didn't get it-- they got a lot of it up, but there was probably 100 houses that didn't get put up.
• [00:41:43.04] SPEAKER: Oh, really?
• [00:41:43.76] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yep.
• [00:41:44.21] SPEAKER: Well, you know, without you not being there supervising. But I read about it. Well, I've seen it. I've seen the villages [INAUDIBLE] Dexter, of course, several times. Yeah, they were like excited to have it up there again this year at the Gordon Hall.
• [00:41:57.83] MILTON CAMPBELL: In fact, it's going to be up there again this next Christmas too.
• [00:42:01.13] SPEAKER: Maybe you could oversee a little more and make sure all those extra houses to get up there this year.
• [00:42:04.88] MILTON CAMPBELL: No. Just too much time.
• [00:42:08.44] SPEAKER: That's a lot of man hours.
• [00:42:09.94] MILTON CAMPBELL: And it's cold there too. So that building wasn't heated very well.
• [00:42:16.07] SPEAKER: Is there anything else you want to talk about? About Argus or the community?
• [00:42:25.66] MILTON CAMPBELL: All I can say is, Argus was a great place to work. I can't say anything bad about them until some of the companies like Mansfield get in all of them and then ruin it. But it was a really sad, sad time when that happened.
• [00:42:41.02] SPEAKER: Do you own any other Argus cameras still?
• [00:42:43.73] MILTON CAMPBELL: No. I think the museum has the majority of them. There might be a few. I have a few-- something around.
• [00:42:50.81] SPEAKER: Yeah.
• [00:42:51.80] MILTON CAMPBELL: When I come across them, I'll donate them to the Argus Museum.
• [00:42:55.69] SPEAKER: Do you miss repairing cameras?
• [00:42:59.38] MILTON CAMPBELL: It was very interesting and There were only for like two of us that could actually solder hairspring on them in a meter,
• [00:43:10.28] SPEAKER: Wow.
• [00:43:11.06] MILTON CAMPBELL: And that's like a watch spring inside. and you'd have to solder it at both ends. And most people couldn't see them even with a magnifying glass. But I could do it just by holding them.
• [00:43:22.79] SPEAKER: That's a talent.
• [00:43:24.82] MILTON CAMPBELL: I was just very steady. And I could take any camera apart and lay all the pieces out and reassemble it without a problem.
• [00:43:32.47] SPEAKER: That's definitely a talent too.
• [00:43:34.54] MILTON CAMPBELL: Some of them had a few hundred parts in them. Not very many people could do that, so it was a really interesting place to work.
• [00:43:50.33] SPEAKER: Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like rewarding too, that you enjoyed your work.
• [00:43:54.17] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yep. It was enjoyable, 90% of the people were good, and except for poor management which never should have happened, Argus should still be there. There was a lot of things that happened. The reason Argus left was just because of management for one thing.
• [00:44:21.90] SPEAKER: Yeah, hindsight too. Sometimes-- Yeah
• [00:44:24.28] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yep. Yeah at one time Polaroid came there when they were first coming out or first expanding in the '50s, or early '50s, and they wanted Argus to build their cameras. And some of the engineers say, oh, that'll never go. So they never did that.
• [00:44:40.88] And then in the late '50s, Nikon wanted them to build cameras for them. And because they were a Japanese company, and instead, Photo Optical in New York ended up getting it. And it wasn't the manufacturing, it was distributing that was the big thing. But they had came to Argus first, and Argus wasn't interested in it.
• [00:45:12.28] SPEAKER: Do you know who the managers were at that time?
• [00:45:16.25] MILTON CAMPBELL: I don't remember who they were. But anyway it was just poor management some times. And when they turned down Nikon and they went with AMEA which was really nothing at the time. Their cameras were really poor design and everything. But some of the management said, oh, this would not go.
• [00:45:39.27] SPEAKER: Too bad.
• [00:45:40.65] MILTON CAMPBELL: But it could have been a big thing for Ann Arbor if Nikon would have been.
• [00:45:49.17] SPEAKER: Yeah.
• [00:45:50.83] MILTON CAMPBELL: Nikon would have had it. Also Kodak, because 2/3 of their film was being ran through Argus cameras. They were going to build a lab here in Ann Arbor 0 and they couldn't get permits to build the lab here for processing film. But that was pretty good thing, because it was a lot of silver that was--
• [00:46:21.43] SPEAKER: All the chemicals?
• [00:46:22.27] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yes, the chemicals were bad for--
• [00:46:24.25] SPEAKER: Environment. Yeah.
• [00:46:25.33] MILTON CAMPBELL: So anyway, that probably wasn't a bad thing, but it could have happened. As far as management, it's what kept Nikon away and some of the other companies.
• [00:46:38.92] SPEAKER: Yeah.
• [00:46:39.40] MILTON CAMPBELL: Polaroid, for example. Those two companies would have really been big.
• [00:46:42.93] SPEAKER: Yeah, it would have really helped Argus out.
• [00:46:44.77] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yeah.
• [00:46:45.24] SPEAKER: Yes. Well, thanks, Milt. I appreciate you spending time here with us.
• [00:46:50.14] MILTON CAMPBELL: Well, you're welcome. It's nice to see the Argus Museum doing well and having all the things that they do that preserve--
• [00:47:05.49] SPEAKER: The legacy of Argus, huh?
• [00:47:06.69] MILTON CAMPBELL: Yes, that's for sure.
• [00:47:06.99] SPEAKER: Yes. Thanks, Milt. I appreciate that.
• [00:47:09.67] MILTON CAMPBELL: Thank you.