San Francisco's Herb Luhn

In a shop ten feet wide, surrounded by seven pawnbrokers and nine saloons, black-haired Herb Luhn, 49, proprietor of the San Francisco Camera Exchange, last week went on being successful in a fantastic way. In normal times his customers ("They're all nuts, they only talk about photography") wait on one another, wrap purchases, ring up the cash register without disturbing him, use his telephone. They patronize no one else because there is no one like him and no shop like his (they have made it a meeting place, a center for the exchange of information).

His showcases, bought secondhand before World War I, are broken, his shelves filled with bullet-dented Japanese helmets and other war mementos sent him by some 70 ex-customers now in the services (he spends an hour a day writing to them). The floor is covered with candy wrappers, bottle tops, memos he writes to himself and periodically dumps out of his pockets. ("We sweep out, the joint on Thursday, but last Thursday we missed.") The war bonds he has purchased are tucked between the keys of an old cash register, the drawer of which is filled with small camera parts, screws and whatever. But all his customers admire his business principles. The most Luhnar of them are:

"The customer is always wrong. If the merchandise is right, the customer is wrong. It's simple.

"If I don't like a guy, why should I do business with him? I sell only to friends.

"Like all good camera dealers I talk a good picture but can't make one.

"Sure, I lend my customers money and give them my clothes. Oh, sometimes they die, but usually they show up and pay."

San Francisco's earthquake jolted Storekeeper Luhn out of the fifth grade, set him to selling newspapers. After service as an artillery private in World War I, he went back to San Francisco to work for the man who owned the shop he owns now. (His partner, astute Mrs. Alice Argus Brady, was bookkeeper for the former owner.) His 96-year-old grandmother takes care of Bachelor Luhn. He says of her: "She is very important."

In normal times Herb Luhn sold a thousand cameras and 10,000 rolls of film a year to amateurs, newspaper photographers and four commercial studios. Now he deals chiefly with the Army, Navy and war industries. To one customer recently Luhn said: "You want film and I have none. But you like my necktie. Here it is. No charge." Storekeeper Luhn and Stabilizer Brady are doing well. Last year they grossed $100,000 in this shop, expect this year to do 50% more.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.