Page 163 - From the Outhouse 4 -21

163 | P A T R I C I A R A E M E R R I T T W H A T L E Y

A Tribute to John Edmon Hitchmon

A Committed and Compassionate Father to His Children

~ John Jr., Kamili, Desiree, and Janai ~

John Edmon Hitchmon was born in Alabama, but he became a bona fide New Yorker – full of grace and out-of-the-box creativity. I say
grace because he was smooth, polite, and soft spoken. Although he had all these gentleman-like qualities, he was shrewd at the same time.

A relative of my first husband who lived in Florida introduced me to John Hitchmon. Isn’t that funny? At the time, I was divorced from

husband number one and had transferred from Nashville, Tennessee, back to Florida. John had just transferred from New York to Miami.

After working for a couple of years for Camera South, a local camera company in Miami, John began to feel frustrated that his skills were
not being compensated. You see, he had become an expert camera man through job training in the Armed Forces and in New York. His

brilliance was in photography – still, as well as film – and he had great artistry. Our artistic minds clicked!

As our relationship developed, I discovered the inner workings of this skilled photographer. Since working for the camera company had

not proved financially productive, John got a job with a local television station as their onsite camera repair technician. Every television
station began to utilize his skills because he was just that good and got many referrals. The thought came to him, “Why not freelance instead

of going through the television station?” So, he began to do the camera repairs from his home. This also led to movie opportunities, which

widened his scope of creativity. In fact, he opened his own camera business named Cina Innovations.

Unfortunately, the movie industry was not ready in the 1970s to hire a real-life, bona fide, certified, black man as a filmmaker. His

frustration reached another level – so he encountered another method of film-type orchestration. There was an out-of-state company, Elko