Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, February 23, 1991                   TAG: 9102230068
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: GEORGE KEGLEY BUSINESS EDITOR
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

EWALD STEPS DOWN, SELLS BUSINESS TO SONS

Retirement recently of F.H. "Tink" Ewald doesn't means the flight of another shop to a suburban mall. Ewald has sold the Ewald-Clark camera chain to his sons, Frank and Gordon, who have long-range plans to expand but to maintain the firm's Church Avenue base.

As a past president of both Downtown Roanoke Inc. and the former Merchants Association of Roanoke Valley, the elder Ewald said, "We did well [in downtown] but we could have continued competing more than we did."

Tink Ewald, a major player in downtown business for 40 years, said the biggest change he's seen was "letting retail shops slip away from us" to the shopping centers.

Ewald is remembered for promoting a plan to cover Church Avenuewith a canopy and plant trees, "but the merchants didn't want to spend the money."

In the late 1960s, Ewald planted tomatoes as a retail promotion in front of his Ewald-Clark store while city crews were rebuilding Church Avenue. And he served sliced tomatoes to customers in the photographic supplies and camera store during the Operation Big Shovel street improvement.

Ewald, 76, worked as a government inspector at the Dublin powder and explosives plant before World War II and served as a photographer in the Army Corps of Engineers. He returned to Roanoke to work at Henebry's Jewelers four years.

When he failed to persuade his boss, Leo Henebry, to add a photographic department, Ewald and a partner, the late Charles Clark, each rounded up $2,000 to start their own business in October 1949. Ewald bought Clark's interest when he left to start a novelty business in 1957.

The company has grown to 41 employees at five locations. Besides downtown, Ewald-Clark has stores on Colonial Avenue across from Towers Shopping Center, at Crossroads Mall, and in Salem and Blacksburg.

Besides selling cameras and photo supplies, the company processes film at its laboratory on Colonial Avenue and has one-hour color photo processing operations downtown and at the Salem and Blacksburg stores.

"That's very lucrative; it holds us together," Ewald said.

The business's future, the Ewalds said, is the high-tech operation of producing photos on compact disks for showing on video cassette recorders. Frank Ewald, who has been president of the firm since the early 1980s, sees a possible expansion into photography lighting equipment and more electronic imaging products with computer-generated effects. Conventional photography will coexist with electronic operations, he said.

The two sons say they will be "mighty prudent for the short term" but they may open another Roanoke Valley store by next year. Because they are buying both the business and its building, the brothers can't afford to make mistakes, said Frank Ewald.

Gordon Ewald, treasurer under the new ownership, said prudent decisions have been made to weather the recession. He came to the family business after four years in middle management of business reporting with Dun & Bradstreet.