[Excerpted from a posting originally intended for my photo blog]
It all started with the Banquet Camera. Kodak (and others like Folmer-Schwing) made these things during the latter part of the 19th century and well into the 20th. Bill found one somewhere in a back room of a camera store in Lakewood, if I recall. Bill, my old photography sidekick and surfing/auto racing/sports magazine shutter for hire, is pictured here in portraits I made in Arizona in 1973 and while shooting in Death Valley in 1976.
And while we are at it, here is a most wonderful image captured of Bill in 2004 by one of his Los Angeles shooter friends, whose name I do not recall.
Bill’s Banquet Camera was a large wooden view camera requiring film in the 10×20 (or was it 12×20?, and that’s inches) format, and was literally designed to photograph large groups in banquet halls in a single panoramic view. Some examples follow; thanks Google!
Bill put all of his natural and acquired skills together — from his experience as a camera repair person for a large camera store in Long Beach to that of serving as a (sometimes ride-along) helicopter mechanic in VietNam — and sufficiently restored the beast to an operational state. The rub was that he had no film for it, but he contacted Eastman Kodak, still alive and well and thriving in Rochester, New York and was told they would look into the matter. When he received a callback in a couple of days advising that they did indeed have some old stock and were willing to negotiate a price, we hit upon a plan to drive there as soon as possible and retrieve the stuff, and shoot large-format all the way home.
Some of you may recall that Bill was head photographer for International Surfing Magazine when I met him in 1968 or 69 or 70. Growing up in Long Beach near the coast and with a father who headed up the aircraft maintenance department at Long Beach Airport, Bill was into both flying and surfing. And somehow photography came along as that was the only thing he liked in school. As we realized that we needed another person to split the cost of gas to New York, we approached Michael, a surfer and appreciator, but non-participant, in things photographic. He agreed, on the condition that we would take surfboards and hit the waves on the East Coast. So as Bill and Michael started planning a surfing itinerary, I made contact with a group of photographers I knew in upstate New York who transformed a farm there into a photography and art education-oriented commune, thereby establishing my way of spending three or four weeks while the others would crawl the East Coast looking for the Big One.
I serviced my 1971 VW camper in anticipation of the trek, and we started accumulating a few necessities to take along. Turned out that a friend of Bill who often dropped into Bill’s studio/darkroom was a State of California employee charged with inspection of food processing facilities. This guy would come by with his longhaired Afgan Hound, grooming the thing while having a beer with us and seeming to hope that we would photograph the dog (which did happen), and regaling us with horror stories of food processing observations. When he learned that we were planning a cross-country trip on a tight budget, he dropped off something that he had been given (was it a bribe? a remainder?) at his most recent inspection gig. It was a case of Chicken of the Sea tuna in oil, which he suggested would stow easily in the VW. 
By the time we reached Texas, we had become so repulsed by the stuff that we vowed never to touch it again — ever. Nevertheless, we kept the unopened cans in the event of some sort of emergency — we did consider this a perilous, high risk journey — but when we broke down and desperately opened some in, was it New Jersey, the smell almost instantly sickened all of us.
So we ultimately made it to Rochester and bought film, but it was too hard to manage on the road in our cramped transport. Thus we only photographed with 35mm cameras and a “small” 4×5 view camera. Tons of photographs were actually taken throughout the trip, but for now I can only locate ones documenting small portions of the junket. Bill and Michael went on to surf in places like Cape Cod, while I dived deeply into photography at the upstate commune (I know that I have some negatives on that). Here are some evidences of activity in and around Washington, D.C., on our approach leg, most of questionable value:
Also we have some mostly nondescript images from New York and on into New England. I should mention that we did something that would be almost unimaginable in this era. We solved the difficulty of finding camping grounds in NYC by driving out to the La Guardia airport parking lot at night, drawing lots to see which lucky person would sleep inside the bus and which two underneath it. Our time there was brief, despite my desire to spend more time in arguably my favorite city in the US, but Bill and Michael wanted to push on to drop me off upstate so they could get cracking in the surf.
More to follow, almost certainly, but don’t expect any coherent order or even decent image quality.