By the time I finished college, I was ready to close the chapter on school.

I had fallen in love with computers and programming. There was something deeply satisfying about writing code that solved problems. Every successful program felt like solving a complicated puzzle. But I also realized that with only a bachelor’s degree, my future would likely consist of sitting in a small cubicle writing programs that someone else had already decided were needed.

I didn’t want to be just the programmer.

I wanted to be the person identifying the problems, designing the systems, and leading the projects. That path required a master’s degree, but after years of school, I simply wanted to start living life.

At the same time, my personal life had fallen apart.

After only two years of marriage, my wife and I separated. I was suddenly alone, uncertain about my future, and searching for a new direction.

Then, almost by accident, everything changed.

One day I noticed a Help Wanted advertisement for a color printer at a small six-hour photo lab in Athens called Kolor Quick. The owner, Louis Dodd, lived in Atlanta and drove his Honda Accord to Athens every day to run the business. The shop occupied a small storefront in the shopping center at the corner of Baxter Street and Rocksprings Road.

Its promise was simple:

“Bring your film in by 10:00 AM, and your prints will be ready by 4:00 PM.”

Today that sounds ordinary, but in the early 1980s it was revolutionary.

I already had years of experience developing black-and-white film and making prints in darkrooms. Photography had become one of my favorite hobbies, and I hoped working in a professional color lab would make me a better photographer.

I applied for the job and was hired.

At the time, the shop employed only four people—the manager and three technicians. It wasn’t glamorous, but from my very first day I knew I had found something fascinating.

The Magic Inside a Film Lab

Most customers never imagined what happened after they dropped off a roll of film.

Behind the counter was an entirely different world.

The first stop was the darkroom.

Employees carried trays stacked with film canisters—35mm, 110, 126, and professional 120 roll film—into a room so dark that after the door closed, you couldn’t see your own hand in front of your face.

Working entirely by touch, we cracked open each film cartridge, carefully unrolled the film, and wound it onto stainless steel hangers. Each rack held several rolls of film with small weights attached to keep the negatives perfectly straight.

Once loaded, the racks were placed into an automated dip-and-dunk processing machine.

Like a mechanical ballet, the machine slowly lifted the rack from one chemical bath to the next—developer, stop bath, fixer, wash, and finally the dryer. Timing had to be exact. A few seconds too long or too short could ruin an entire day’s memories. Once the machine did get stuck and we lost six rolls of a customer’s trip to Canada to see the birth of her first grand baby. It was my responsibility to inform the customer. I can still hear her screams. 

When the negatives emerged dry, they moved to the printing room.

That’s where I spent most of my time.

Learning to See Color

Printing color photographs wasn’t as simple as pushing a button.

Each negative passed over a light source where I examined every frame. Every photograph was different.

Some were too dark. Some were underexposed. Others had a yellow, blue, or magenta color cast.

The printer couldn’t think for itself.

The operator had to analyze every image and manually adjust the color balance and exposure before the picture was projected onto a continuous roll of four-inch-wide Kodak photographic paper.

Hours later, after dozens of rolls of film had been printed, we closed the printing room, turned out the lights, removed the exposed paper from its light-tight compartment, and rushed it to another processor.

The paper then traveled through its own series of developer, bleach, fixer, wash, and drying stages. Eventually a long ribbon of finished photographs emerged from the dryer.

We loaded that ribbon onto an automatic cutter, which advanced exactly six inches at a time, producing the familiar 4×6 prints.

Every print was inspected. If colors weren’t right or density was off, the negatives went back to the printer, and we started again.

Speed mattered. Quality mattered more.

Some days we processed hundreds of rolls of film between ten in the morning and four in the afternoon. Every employee stayed busy from the moment the doors opened until the last customer picked up their prints.

Learning the Business

My trainer was a burly, bearded fellow named Al, who was preparing to leave the company. He taught me how to operate the Kodak printers, read negatives, balance colors, and troubleshoot problems. I soaked up every bit of knowledge he offered.

My starting salary was $125 per week. The pay wasn’t impressive, but I didn’t care.I wanted to learn. Most weeks I worked far more than forty hours simply because I was fascinated by every part of the business.Within a few months I wasn’t just making prints. I understood the workflow, scheduling, customer service, inventory, equipment maintenance, and employee responsibilities.

One day I worked up enough courage to approach Louis Dodd. I told him that I believed the current manager wasn’t doing the job well. Then I made a proposal that surprised even me.”Let him go,” I said. “Give me the job instead. You can pay me a little more, eliminate the manager’s salary, and save money.” To my amazement, Mr. Dodd agreed. Almost overnight I became both manager and head printer.

Looking back, I can’t believe I had the confidence—or nerve—to make that suggestion.

A Mentor

Over the next several years Louis Dodd became much more than my employer. He became my mentor. He taught me how to deal with customers, manage employees, advertise, market, and understand the financial side of a small business. I learned that every customer interaction mattered. Every complaint was an opportunity. Every expense affected profit. Every employee influenced the reputation of the business.

Looking back, those lessons were worth far more than anything I learned in college. I also think Mr. Dodd appreciated my work ethic.

Fresh out of school, separated from my wife, and determined to build a future, I routinely worked fifty to sixty hours every week. Work became my classroom.

Contemporary Sights

One of our largest commercial customers was a photography company called Contemporary Sights, founded by two talented local photographers, Terry Allen and Fred Bennett.

Their business model was brilliant.

Every weekend they photographed fraternity and sorority parties across the University of Georgia campus.

They didn’t photograph posed portraits.

They photographed fun. Friends laughing. People dancing.  Groups celebrating.  Hundreds of candid moments.

The film came directly to Kolor Quick. We developed every roll, printed contact sheets, mounted them onto large order forms, and delivered those forms to each fraternity and sorority house.

Students circled the pictures they wanted, placed their orders, and we produced the finished prints.

Every photograph included the date, organization, and event printed along the bottom.

It was an enormous operation.

On busy weekends Contemporary Sights alone could generate nearly $10,000 in print sales—a tremendous amount of money at the time.

Managing that account, along with our regular customers, kept me working long hours.

Starting Over

Those years weren’t easy financially.

As part of my divorce settlement, I agreed to take responsibility for nearly everything.

My former wife kept the car, but I continued making the payments.

I also assumed all the credit card debt.

To simplify life, I rented an apartment directly behind Kolor Quick on Baxter Street so I could walk to work.

When late-night printing jobs came in—and they often did—I only had a short walk home.

Mr. Dodd was always willing to let me borrow his car to buy groceries.

Eventually I managed to save $200 and bought an ancient Dotsun station wagon with more than 200,000 miles on it. 

It burned more oil than gasoline and nearly every morning I sprayed carburetor cleaner into the engine just to get it started. It wasn’t much to look at, but it represented freedom.

February 25, 1982

Then came the day that changed my life forever.

A young woman named Pamela Catherine Hendrix Hunter walked into Kolor Quick carrying several rolls of film.

For me, it was love at first sight.

Pam had recently purchased a Pentax 35mm SLR camera and wanted help understanding photography. She was especially interested in learning how aperture and shutter speed affected an image.

Her favorite subject was her one-year-old niece, Briana, the daughter of her sister Phyllis.

Whenever Pam returned to pick up her prints, we’d spread them across the counter and spend nearly an hour studying every photograph.

Why was this one soft? Why was that one underexposed? What would happen if she’d used a faster shutter speed?  Or a smaller aperture?

She listened carefully, asked thoughtful questions, and genuinely wanted to improve.

Those conversations gradually became the highlight of my day.

Pam had also been through a difficult separation and was in the process of finalizing her divorce. She lived in a small apartment beside the House of 10,000 Picture Frames, where she worked. I lived behind Kolor Quick. She owned a very energetic, smart Australian Shepherd puppy named Katy and before long, we were meeting in parks and neighborhoods just to walk Katy together.

Falling in Love

In May 1982 I invited Pam to go with me while I took photographs at a fraternity party for Contemporary Sights. I wanted her to experience 

It was unlike anything she’d ever experienced.

Those parties could become wild.

Flying beer.

Food fights.

The occasional fistfight.

Photographers were paid by the number of rolls they shot, so speed mattered.

I had learned to keep one eye pressed against the camera’s viewfinder while the other watched the crowd for trouble.

Pam wasn’t quite sure what she’d gotten herself into.

She was still recovering emotionally from her failed marriage and understandably cautious about another relationship.

I, on the other hand, was completely captivated.

One winter evening I even walked through a driving snowstorm from my apartment on Baxter Street to her place on Prince Avenue, hoping to catch her outside walking Katy.

That’s what young love will do.

Later that year we both finalized our divorces and agreed to take things slowly. 

Our first official date was lunch at Cleve’s on Baxter Street.

Another favorite became The Peddler Steak House, where we’d order steak sandwiches, fries, and a beer while Kitty, one of the regular servers, took care of us.

We told ourselves we were moving slowly. Looking back, maybe not so slowly.

Within little more than a year, I moved in with Pam, then briefly moved out to give her some space. Ironically, she decided she’d had enough space after just one night and moved into my duplex the very next day.

Sometime in 1983 I asked her to marry me.She didn’t immediately say yes and I was crushed. Her close friend Alice encouraged me to be patient. “Just give her time,” she said. “She’ll come around.”

She was right.

Pam eventually accepted my proposal, and we chose October 6, 1984, as our wedding day.

We were married at the historic Georgian Hotel in downtown Athens.

It turned out to be the hotel’s final event before it closed for conversion into condominiums.

Looking back, it’s remarkable how quickly life can change.

Only a few years earlier I had been a newly divorced college graduate wondering what direction my life would take.

A chance newspaper advertisement led me into a little photo lab called Kolor Quick.

That job introduced me to photography, taught me how to run a business, gave me a mentor in Louis Dodd, and, most importantly, introduced me to the woman who would become my wife.

Sometimes the smallest decisions—answering a classified ad, taking a job, or helping someone understand a camera—end up changing the entire course of your life.

The Sports Section

By the late summer of 1983, life at the photo lab had begun to change.

One evening, while driving home to Atlanta, Mr. Dodd was involved in a serious automobile accident. His injuries kept him away from the business for several months. During his absence, the responsibility for keeping the lab operating fell squarely on my shoulders. I made sure customer orders were completed on time, the employees stayed productive, supplies were ordered, and the books were kept up to date. For the first time, I wasn’t simply an employee—I was running the business.

I enjoyed the challenge. It gave me confidence that one day I really could own a business of my own.

When Mr. Dodd finally returned, however, things were different between us.

For one thing, I was no longer interested in buying the lab. A new photo store had opened in Athens with a state-of-the-art Noritsu one-hour processing machine. Overnight, customers who once waited six hours for prints could have them in about an hour. The photo industry was changing rapidly, and the little lab no longer seemed like the opportunity it once had.

Just as important, my priorities had changed.

I had fallen in love with Pam. For the first time in years, work was no longer the center of my life. I wanted evenings and weekends together, and I wanted something resembling a normal work week. Instead of sixty- and seventy-hour weeks, I wanted to cut back to about forty-five hours.

Mr. Dodd wasn’t happy with that idea.

The relationship between us gradually became strained. Neither of us said much about it, but we both knew we wanted different things.

About that time two men named Carl and Dan entered my life.

They were an interesting pair—natural-born salesmen who seemed capable of selling almost anything to anyone. For years they had sold fundraising products to schools throughout Georgia: candy, greeting cards, wrapping paper, and dozens of other items. More importantly, they had built strong relationships with principals, coaches, and school administrators across the state.

One day, while visiting a school, they noticed a photographer taking team and individual sports pictures.

A light bulb went off.

If schools could raise money selling candy bars, why couldn’t they raise money selling sports photographs?

It was a simple idea, but a brilliant one.

They created a company called The Sports Section that operated much like the fundraising companies they already knew. Schools scheduled picture day, parents ordered photos, the schools received a percentage of the sales, and everyone benefited.

Because Carl and Dan were such exceptional salesmen, the business exploded almost immediately.

The only problem was that they didn’t own a photo lab.

Every roll of film had to be sent to another laboratory for processing and printing. They were at the mercy of someone else’s schedule, someone else’s prices, and someone else’s capabilities. They couldn’t introduce new products without convincing another lab to make them.

It didn’t take long before they realized they needed to control their own production.

While shopping for used photo equipment, they discovered that Mr. Dodd was selling his lab.

The negotiations happened without me.

One day I learned that the lab had been sold. Mr. Dodd never discussed it with me, and as best I can remember, I never saw or spoke to him again. It was an abrupt ending to a chapter of my life.

Carl and Dan knew almost nothing about operating a professional photo lab.

Fortunately, they knew someone who did.

One of the first things they did was offer me a raise to $500 a week—a significant increase over what I had been earning. More importantly, they trusted me. Instead of simply telling me what to do, they asked for my opinions and encouraged my ideas.

It was a refreshing change.

As the business grew, my responsibilities expanded well beyond processing film.

Every sports package required custom masks and layouts for memory mates, team photos, and specialty prints. I designed and prepared those templates so the finished products looked professional.

My computer programming background proved valuable once again. Parents loved sports trading cards featuring their children, but Carl and Dan wanted something different from everyone else. I wrote a computer program that printed each child’s personal statistics on the back of every sports card, making each one unique.

Today that may sound ordinary, but in the early 1980s it was something few companies could do.

I also researched and purchased equipment that allowed us to manufacture photo buttons and key chains in-house. Every new product created another source of revenue.

Business grew at an astonishing pace.

Hundreds of rolls of film poured into the lab every month from school picture days, while we continued processing film for our regular retail customers. During busy seasons, it seemed there was always another batch of negatives to develop, another printer to keep running, or another deadline to meet.

The pace was exhausting—but exciting.

Carl and Dan were never content to stand still.

Within months they had another ambitious idea.

Instead of simply operating one successful company, why not franchise the entire concept?

They quickly developed a franchise system and began selling territories throughout the country.

Since I was the one with the photography experience, I became the trainer.

Whenever a new franchise owner came on board, I traveled to teach them how to photograph youth sports teams. The process itself wasn’t complicated. Most sessions were held outdoors using fill flash to soften harsh shadows. The real challenge was organizing dozens of energetic children and keeping the schedule moving.

I traveled to Texas, Detroit, and Florida, helping new franchise owners get started.

It was my first experience traveling for business, and I enjoyed seeing different parts of the country while helping build something new.

Success created another problem.

Our small Athens lab simply couldn’t keep up with the growing volume from dozens of franchise locations. In early 1985, Carl and Dan decided to move the entire operation to a much larger building on Hammermill Road in Tucker, Georgia.

Once again, they turned to me.

My job was to dismantle the existing lab, oversee the move, reinstall every piece of equipment, calibrate the processors and printers, and get production running again as quickly as possible.

Nothing about the move went smoothly.

Every day seemed to present another unexpected problem. Equipment broke. Chemicals had to be recalibrated. Plumbing needed modifications. Electrical systems weren’t quite right. It felt like solving one crisis after another.

Meanwhile, life at home was changing just as quickly.

Pam and I had married on October 6, 1984. We had recently purchased our beautiful property on Lake Oglethorpe, and every evening she worked on designing the house we hoped to build there. She poured over sketches, floor plans, and ideas while I was often hundreds of miles away mentally—or physically.

My daily routine became brutal.

I was getting up around four o’clock every morning to drive more than an hour to Tucker, often returning home long after dark. Some days I wondered whether I spent more time on the road than I did with my new wife.

Carl and Dan appreciated my commitment. As a reward for the long hours and the successful move, they gave me shares of stock in The Sports Section. A few years after I had left the company, they asked to buy my shares back, and I sold them for $12,000—a very nice return on something I had never expected to receive.

By the summer of 1985, Pam and I had another important goal. We both wanted a family.

Since Pam was already thirty-six years old, we knew we couldn’t wait very long. In July she became pregnant with our first child, wonderful news that made us even more determined to build a different kind of life. The long commute, endless hours, and constant travel were no longer sustainable.

I realized that if I continued living this way, I would miss the very things I had worked so hard to achieve—a marriage, a home, and a family.

In August, I submitted my resignation, with September 1, 1985, set as my last day.

Because the company had relocated away from Athens, I qualified for six weeks of unemployment benefits after leaving, which provided a small financial cushion while I figured out what came next.

Leaving The Sports Section was both frightening and liberating.

When I had first joined the photo lab years earlier, I dreamed of becoming a business owner. Somewhere along the way, my work had gradually narrowed until I had become little more than a highly skilled photo lab technician. The creativity, the decision-making, and the excitement of building something were slipping away.

I knew I wanted more. I didn’t know exactly what my next opportunity would be, but I knew it was time to find it. Looking back, leaving The Sports Section wasn’t the end of a career. It was the beginning of the life Pam and I truly wanted to build together.