William Black saw himself as a simple merchant, a third-generation one at that. He fit the bill: Direct, hardworking and pragmatic, yet humble and thrifty. He clipped coupons from newspapers. Mr. Black, with his brothers Robert (Bob), Barry, Bruce and sister Barbara, built a Canadian success story with their eponymous chain of camera and photofinishing stores, and transformed industry standards back when customers had to wait for their pictures to be developed.
A high school dropout, William Black presided over a family retail empire that grew to 100 Black's Photography outlets across Canada by the time the company was sold in 1985 for $100-million. His persona is perhaps best exemplified by the title of his unpublished memoirs: The Luckiest Person I Know: M e!
He learned business skills at the knee of his headstrong grandmother, Blanche Black, who with her husband Freddy owned and operated Black's Forest Hill Market, opened in 1914. The clan lived above the store. But their son Eddie - William's father - wasn't much interested in the grocery business. His hobby was making radios. So in 1930, with $500 borrowed from his parents, Eddie opened Eddie Black's Ltd. at Yonge Street and St. Clair Avenue in Toronto. Despite the Depression, he was able to broaden his radio business to include electrical appliances. A handsome man with personality to spare, he built a loyal clientele.
William, the eldest of his five children, recognized the store's founding as a pivotal event in his life: "It was my father who laid the foundation for my brothers and me to become recognized as leaders in the retail photography business," he would recount.
Business progressed nicely until the Second World War, when factories had to retool for war production. But the quick-thinking Eddie hit on an idea. A visit by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth was approaching in 1939, and he realized the public was suddenly hungry for cameras. He added a few to the store and they quickly sold out. So he added more, and they sold too.
Meantime, the war-time shortage of young men led William to a program of working for a farmer in exchange for being promoted to the next grade. His job, starting at 5 a.m., was to remove a 10-foot high by 10-foot wide pile of manure from a pigpen with only a pitchfork, shovel and wheelbarrow. No surprise that he hated it, but "I just passed gym, math class and social studies," he reasoned. "Not a bad trade after all."
Two years later, he dropped out of high school to work fulltime for his grandparents. These were grueling, 16-hour days starting at dawn with visits to the St. Lawrence Market to buy that day's fresh fruits and vegetables. Then he would help the butcher prepare the meat orders and fill telephone orders for delivery after 4 p.m. Evenings were spent cleaning the store. Often, he would fall asleep on his grandmother's couch upstairs. That year, he lost 25 pounds, but learned discipline and fortitude.
The grocery was sold in 1942, clearing the way for William to join the Royal Canadian Air Force, stationed in Quebec. He later transferred to the navy, helping to decommission warships in Halifax.
While a sailor, he tried out for the naval hockey team as a goaltender. On his first scrimmage, Gaye Stewart, a fearsome left-winger for the Toronto Leafs, ripped a slapshot on net. "I woke up to my next conscious moment in the hospital with a broken and wired-shut jaw," Mr. Black wrote in his memoirs. "I could not speak for some time and received all my sustenance through an IV and a straw. That ended my hockey career."
Back home in his father's business, he and Robert hauled large appliances to buyers, a job that grew less attractive with each back-breaking delivery. "It did not take us long to realize that there was little glamour in selling and delivering washing machines," William recalled.
"In the first year working for my father, he fired me three times and I quit once."
It became apparent that the appliance business was no more suited to the Black brothers than the grocery business had been for their father.
Eddie Black permitted William to expand the store's photo counter with more equipment and movie film. Soon, the operation split into two stores, with the appliance division moving down the street, and the brothers opening their own department store on the original site. To keep the family peace, half the store was devoted to fishing tackle, shotguns, rifles and other sporting goods in accord with Robert's wishes. The boys prospered, expanding to 16mm sound projectors that were purchased from the YMCA, Red Cross and Salvation Army. The machines were repaired or cleaned up, and sold to a waiting market.
That, in turn, led to a new-fangled area: A film rental library, which became popular for birthday parties and in-home entertainment. The Blacks eventually stocked over 50 full-length feature films and hundreds of cartoons, travel, adventure, sports and musical shorts, presaging video rental stores by decades.
By 1949, it was obvious that cameras were outselling sporting goods, so the brothers decided to focus solely on photo gear, even though cameras at the time were almost painful to use because they were so complicated. Wrote Robert Black in Picture Perfect, a published history of the company, "you had to focus, cock the shutter, set the lens opening and speed, set your flash and figure out the proper distance. Photography often required a tripod. If you had slides, you needed trays, a projector, and a screen. Movies needed splicers, reels and cans."
Even so, "our timing was perfect. In less than a decade, the camera went from being a specialty item to a common family purchase."
As William put it, "we were certainly in the right place at the right time for phenomenal growth." Good thing too, because the post-war boom saw companies that had made bombs and bullets return to making appliances, but the sudden glut meant small businesses could barely keep up. To make up for their father's declining sales, the Black brothers expanded the original appliance store to create what was thought to be Canada's largest photography shop.
They soon bought out another camera store in downtown Toronto, and in time for their fifth outlet in 1956, formed a new company, Eddie Black's Stores Ltd. Expansion into Kitchener, Hamilton and London, Ont. followed. By 1960 they tallied 10 stores and $1-million in annual sales.
They opened a "modest" photofinishing lab in North Toronto for prints and colour slides in 1961, the year that was burned into the family's memory when the company became the first chain retailer to be charged with misleading advertising under the federal Combines Investigation Act.
The case was built on the word "regular" as used to describe prices in advertising flyers. The brothers argued that the word denoted the manufacturer's suggested retail price, but the government insisted the consumer would infer it meant the normal retail price. Ottawa prevailed, and the company was fined $100 on each of the 13 counts, generating embarrassing headlines. "It was a blow to our pride," William allowed.
To add insult to injury, his father repaired to Toronto's Granite Club to drown his sorrows on the day the story hit the papers. There, he wondered aloud to a fellow member, a lawyer, whether the boys should appeal the ruling. The lawyer thought an appeal would not succeed, and a short time later, sent Eddie a bill for $500 for "opinion rendered regarding court action." William called it the most expensive drink his father ever had.
The brothers bounced back. Eager to employ new methods, they held in-store demonstrations and provided photography lessons. "In those days, we didn't make much money, but we had a lot of excitement," Robert Black recalled in a company profile. "My brother Bill would keep on buying volume deals on cameras and I had to work day and night trying to sell them."
Stores were sharp and clean, staff were fully trained, and the windows were always dressed to attract the attention not only of pedestrians but of riders on passing streetcars. Early on, the Blacks employed nationally known voices for radio advertising, including Fred Davis, host of CBC's Front Page Challenge. Later, it was Martin Short of SCTV fame who appeared as himself and his various manic characters in Black's TV commercials, featuring the "Black's is photography" jingle.
By 1969, the Blacks were operating 19 stores with annual sales of $6-million. The company went public that year on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
Meantime, photo technology had been accelerating at breakneck pace, and they kept up with all the developments, from Polaroids to inexpensive Kodak Instamatics that used cartridge film, to fully automatic single-lens reflex cameras, and an ever-growing number of attachments and gadgets. (Rival Japan Camera claims it opened the first one-hour photofinishing lab in North America).
But the Blacks' biggest breakthrough came in 1977 when they revolutionized the industry.
Feeling the heat from the instant pictures Polaroids and later Kodak cameras were generating, they needed something bold and unique. The answer lay in the size of the pictures themselves. The standard at the time was 3.5-by-5 inches, so why not boost that to 4-by-6 inches? It wasn't as easy as it sounded.
The brothers visited the Kodak factory in Rochester, N.Y., which said it could make a custom printer - but only for one size. In other words, there was no turning back; it was 4-by-6 or nothing. The brothers rolled the dice, and realized they also had to offer new frames and photo albums to go with the new size.
The gambit paid off. Not only did the bigger prints catch on, it took competitors years to do the same and establish them as the norm. Business at Black's ballooned to $30-million by 1979, and to $67-million by 1984. The 113-store company was bought by Telus Corp. last September.
Far from recoiling from it, William Black embraced the digital photo revolution, to the point where he became adept at constructing large family photo collages on the computer. His daughter, Cassie, laughed when she recalled her wedding, where her father persuaded the photographer to hand over his film so Black's could develop it. "It was unheard of," she said.
Ultimately, her father trafficked in memories. "He was very committed to memories. That's what he did. He marketed memories."
William Edward Black was born in Toronto on Dec. 26, 1925 and died there on March 6, 2010 of pancreatic cancer. He was 84. He leaves his wife of 61 years, Frances (née Graham), children Eddie, Donald, David and Cassie, 14 grandchildren, two great-grandsons and siblings Barry, Bruce and Barbara Wurster. Robert Black died last April.