One-Shot Frony

I had just finished taking a group photo for the Southeast Missourian early in my career. A man in the photo suggested that someday, if I worked real hard, that I might get to be as good as Frony. "He only took one shot!"

It was an ideal that gave me pause. Was he serious? I thought that film was the cheapest commodity. You can't go back and do it again if something goes wrong. People can blink at the wrong time. Once I shot three frames of a group of three people. Each frame had a blinker. Film can be damaged during developing. Someone might open the darkroom door at the wrong time. Those were the days.

I worked with Garland D. Fronabarger, known as Frony to everyone, in the late 1970s. I would develop his 35mm film of business buildings or other pictures that he took for his business column in the newspaper. I did not know much about his photographic career until later when I found a vast collection of his 4x5 black and white negatives.

G.D. Fronabarger is shown working in the darkroom at the Southeast Missourian during the 1950s.

Surely Frony's "One Shot" reputation came about from the technology of an era when a 4x5 Speed Graphic was the popular camera for news photographers. Two shots per film holder. Take out the dark slide to expose. Slide it back in. One shot left. Frony used this camera into the early 1960s before changing to 35mm film.

Frony's photographs have found a new audience on the Internet. Each week I post two old pictures with historical background from the Southeast Missourian archives to my blog, F8 and Be There, at seMissourian.com. I like to say that Frony is a frequent contributor with photos he made from the 1930s to the 1960s. Some pictures I use pre-date his career at The Missourian, going back to the early 1920s.

Frony started at the Southeast Missourian in 1927 as a reporter, the year the Marquette Hotel opened, he would say. As technology advanced, newspapers began using photographs and Frony taught himself photography. The Missourian began using his pictures in the mid-1930s. He retired in 1986. Before I knew of his early career, I asked Frony why people called him One Shot. "Because I had to buy my own film!" he said.