Anyway, here's to Tri-X and in this neck of the woods, D76 or ID11 developer with perhaps Ilford FP4/HP5 as well as the Kodak range. Those were the days, hunched over a baseboard in the dark, inhaling deep lungfuls of developer/fixer fumes, fretting, fretting, fretting.... Come to think of it, despite all the fantastic advances, I don't think there is yet a greater rush that seeing that print slowly emerge in the developer dish - but, hell, what a price we had to pay for the thrill.
Hi Seamus, Got to tell you about the darkroom two friends and I built in Korea. There wasn't any place locally in Taegu or on the base that could do personal film processing or printing. You had to send your stuff to Japan (or the States), and wait and wait. The war was over and we were snapping up a storm, so we were desperate.
We were living in open barracks left behind eight years earlier by the Japanese. The buildings were wooden frames covered with chicken wire, covered in turn with a messy variety of concrete. As one wit remarked, "You could throw a cat through the walls." We requisitioned one corner of a barrack, scrounged some lumber and plywood, built a couple interior walls and put in a door.
There wasn't any running water in the barracks, so we found a discarded F84 tip-tank, built a frame outside our new "room" to hold the tank fairly high, and bribed a flightline crew chief to deliver it, ran some pipe through the wall with a faucet on the end, and bribed the guy who drove the drinking-water tanker to check it on his rounds and keep it full. We mail-ordered an enlarger, some trays, a couple film tanks, and some D-76 from Japan, and scrounged a bunch of outdated paper and some Dektol from the base photo lab.
It was one of the most rinky-dink setups I've ever seen. The worst problem was the lack of temperature control, and as any Marine from those days can tell you, it gets damned cold in Korea in the winter. We used a tabletop electric heater to give us a bit of temperature control over the film processing, but printing was something else. It takes a long time for a print to come up in developer that's, say, 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
But in spite of the problems (nowadays for some mysterious reason called "issues,") the thrill was there when the film finally dried and you could begin to see what you'd got. And, as always, watching a contact sheet come up in the cold developer was a thrill you just don't get in Photoshop. But, as you pointed out, you don't get the fumes either, and you don't have to do all the cleaning up afterwards.
I don't remember what the print was like, or even if there was a print, but here's a scan of one of the callow youths involved in the project, from what to me seems an unbelievably good negative considering the method by which it was produced. I can still smell the developer.