If you caught the photography bug after shooting family snapshots with a Kodak Instamatic, you most likely headed to Witte Camera or its successor, Camera Land, to upgrade to a 35mm Nikon or Cannon.
Looking back, Chuck Siekman thinks his involvement in the retail camera business hit the golden age of photography before cell phone cameras became ubiquitous. Eastman Kodak introduced the first Instamatic in 1963, a camera that simplified picture taking by including a film cartridge that users dropped into the back of the camera. Siekman was 25 years old, and he had been building the camera business at Witte Drug Co. since he was 18. For the next 50-some years, he would continue to help both amateur and serious photographers upgrade to more sophisticated equipment and learn how to take captivating photos.
Siekman started working at Witte’s at 200 Jefferson St. when he was 16, “at the bottom of the bottom,” he told this author. When he wasn’t driving the truck to make deliveries of prescriptions and sundries to Witte customers, he was operating the machine that peeled potatoes for the lunch counter. “This evolved into running the check cashing and money-order window at the back of the store. I was working seven days a week, 40 hours a week when I was in high school. I loved it.”
That was no small responsibility in the mid-1950s, Siekman noted. Many people didn’t have checking accounts back then, and they’d line up at the money-order window in the back of Witte’s to cash their payroll checks and purchase money orders for paying their rent or their alimony. A holiday weekend would require having about $30,000 in cash on hand, Siekman marveled, the equivalent of about $280,000 in 2019. That experience taught Siekman a lot about business. “I had a mini-MBA before I even graduated from high school because I knew how things worked.”
Siekman went off to the University of Iowa after graduating from Burlington High School in 1957, but he wasn’t there long. One day, his father called him to say that someone at Witte’s had contacted him to see if Siekman would be interested in managing the store’s camera department. “I said, ‘I’d like that better than what I’m doing,’” Siekman recalled. He returned to Burlington, and started to work, with the goal of growing the small department.
He had enjoyed photography as a teen, and he had traveled to Cuba the summer after graduation–the beginning of a lifetime of world travel.
After working a few months in his new job, Siekman drove to Rochester, New York, home of Eastman Kodak, to get training there in retail sales. Before leaving Burlington, Siekman made drawings of how he’d like the camera department to be moved to the front right of the store’s entrance. Workers from the well-known local construction company Carl A. Nelson came in and built it. Early on, the enterprise was called the Camera Department at Witte’s, “and then we changed it to Witte Camera because it was becoming a pretty dominant factor in the business,” Siekman said.
Did you enjoy this excerpt from “Beloved Burlington: Featuring businesses you knew and loved?”
The book, which contains chapters on 10 other businesses and many historical photos, is available for $19.99 at Burlington By The Book, 301 Jefferson St., Burlington, Iowa and by mail order. For details, click here.
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