Bob Moler walks around the back rooms of his downtown camera shop on Douglas near Grove.
It’s cluttered with boxes of camera equipment; there’s paper everywhere. But amid the disorder, it’s clear that the business has a storied history in Wichita.
It’s a time capsule of photo history – and then video – for most of the past century, from processing black and white film to now working in more digital formats.
“This is the old man’s desk,” Moler said. “I remember that from when I was a kid, when he had his first store downtown. It was an old desk then; it’s even older now.”
Moler’s is one of the last camera shops in Kansas. And it’s closing the doors to its retail side later this summer.
Bob’s father, Orville, first opened the shop on Broadway in downtown Wichita in 1946.
“He kept at it for the rest of his life, and mom was a bookkeeper,” Bob Moler said. “Got to keep the expenses down, keep it all in the family. And my older brother worked there for a long time.”
Like many other longstanding businesses, Moler’s had to change with the times and the advancement of new technology.
But Moler said it’s time to close the retail side and focus more on repairs, online sales and video conversions.
“We started doing this almost 30 years ago, and I figured 10 years tops, it'll all be over, because nobody’s shooting movies anymore, they’re using video sets,” Moler said of converting old home movies into video.
“It hasn’t slowed down; it just keeps coming in. I don’t know where all of this has been hiding.”
Moler is 82 years old, and said he’s debated retiring for years. This time, though, the deaths of close friends and family members made him realize he has other things he’d like to do in life aside from work.
“I've got three nice old Hudson’s that really need care and some help,” he said of his vintage cars.
Former Wichita Eagle photographer Brian Corn said he started going to Moler’s when he was a student studying photography at Wichita State University in the 1970s.
At that time, Bob’s father was still running the shop.
Corn said he’ll always remember the welcoming environment of the store, especially for someone like him who was still learning how to shoot photos.
“I think the mom and pop feel to Moler’s was a big part of their success for young students like myself – and just a man on the street who was interested in … getting photo supplies,” Corn said.
That was years before digital photography came onto the scene, when photos were shot on film and developed by hand.
“Those days, photography to me was real magic,” Corn said. “Watching the film develop or the paper or the print come up in the printing tray in the darkroom, it was all magic to me.”
While the store was a mainstay for photographers in town, closing it is just another change Moler said he’s had to make to adapt to new technology.
“It's been kind of nice, theoretically, owning my own business,” he said. “Course some people say, ‘Well, the business owns you.’ Well, in that matter of speaking, it does, kind of …
“I don't regret it.”
