This was the one day parents would let kids use the family’s camera, and things like film and flashbulbs made picture taking expensive. Plus cost to develop. In the end you were lucky if 20% of your pics didn’t turn out like crap.
I got a basic Kodak pocket camera of my own when I was in elementary school (can’t remember whether Christmas or birthday). IIRC it took the flash cubes instead of the flash bar shown above. It’s still here somewhere. Dad had one with the built in flash, like Michael Landon is holding. I had to save up my allowance to buy film and to get it developed. We used to take our film to those little Fotomat huts you would see in various parking lots. They were cheap, but it took a few days to get them back. By the time I had worked my way up to a 35mm camera, there were one hour photo developers in just about every drug store. That was great! It was such a luxury when I got my first digital camera and could see the photos immediately (even if the thing was huge - it used 3.5 inch floppy disks for storage).
