His history was Charlotte’s history: Neil Biggs, longtime camera shop owner, dies at 94
When she’s asked to describe her late father, longtime Charlotte camera store owner Neil Biggs, Cathy Carter recalls a trip she took with him four or five years ago to the Charlotte Museum of History.
At almost every exhibit, Carter learned, her father’s story and his city’s intertwined.
As a 10-year-old in 1936, he hawked The Charlotte Observer outside of brand new Memorial Stadium while President Franklin Roosevelt spoke inside. As a high school student at Harding, he walked with his mother down South Boulevard to his part-time job at Lance crackers. Later, he became friends with Billy Graham and his family, eventually shooting some of the earliest photographs of the preacher as he saved souls.
As their walk through the museum took them through generations of Charlotte’s past, Carter says she was flabbergasted by her father’s personal connections with many of the city’s seminal locales, people and events.
“His history was the history of Charlotte for almost a century,” she says.
His biggest dream: To open his own camera store. Hi-Fi Camera Center, later renamed Biggs Camera, opened in Charlottetown Mall in 1959. He was 92 when he retired, son Steve Biggs says.
Neil Biggs, 94, died on Saturday. A memorial service will be delayed until the summer, Carter says. The menu is already set: barbecue and Cheerwine, Charlotte icons and Biggs’ lifelong loves.
Neil Biggs’ near century in Charlotte opened modestly — he grew up in a single-parent family that was pushed by poverty between a family farm in South Carolina to a boarding home on Brevard Street, with stops at the Salvation Army in between.
Rather than growing embittered by his family’s circumstances, Steve Biggs says the early struggles made his father kindhearted and deeply spiritual. A hard day’s work also became a kind of hobby.
“I think he just gained a good, honest lifestyle from growing up that way,” says Steve Biggs, who now runs the camera store.
Neil Biggs’ path through life swung on a trip he made to an uptown pawn shop as a 13-year-old. There, for literally pocket change, he bought a used Chicago-made Mercury camera. The purchase was akin to removing the lens cap on his future. Soon, he was developing his own film in a closet at home.
During World War II, when Biggs was in his early 20s, he got a job at the Charlotte Quartermaster Depot, which opened in 1941 inside the old Ford plant on Statesville Road. One of his jobs was developing film sent back from the battlefields. In that role, Carter says, Biggs helped produce some of the first photographs of Holocaust survivors discovered at the end of the European theater.
Biggs’ job at the depot also had a significant impact on his personal life. An older female co-worker took a liking to him and offered to introduce him to her daughter. Those kind of a social transactions rarely work out. This one did. Neil and Dorothy Biggs were married for 56 years before her death in 2002.
Dot Biggs got an early indication of what married life to a photographer would be like on the couple’s honeymoon to Miami in 1946. There, Neil came across a rare 4 by 5 speed graphic camera, again in a pawn shop, then persuaded a Charlotte friend to wire him the money. A family photo shows Biggs posing with his new prize in front of the Miami train station. Dot snapped the shot.
Biggs later became a photographer/printer and graphic designer for the regional offices of Esso, a precursor to Exxon. He worked there for two decades until he decided to dive in on his lifelong dream.
Steve Biggs says his father was a successful businessman not only by how he treated his customers but how he and his sons — brothers Mark and Wayne ran the family’s printing center until it closed — spotted trends.
Biggs Camera became the first Charlotte camera shop to offer same-day film processing (“In by 10, out by 5”), then the first to market a one-hour turnaround. Today, Biggs Camera on Kings Drive continues to surf the digital revolution that has closed many of its local competitors.
“The website has become more and more important to our business,” Steve Biggs says. “But there are a certain number of people who still like to come in and hold, touch and feel a piece of equipment, to have someone explain how something works, to help them find the product they need.”
That is also part of Neil Biggs’ legacy, his children say. Until his 2018 stroke, he kept coming to the shop to talk with customers and have lunch with Steve at Art’s barbecue on Morehead, another Charlotte landmark that, at the time, was nearing the end of its run.
The camera shop “generated joy,” Carter says. “It was what he loved.
“Anybody he met got a smile, a handshake and a chance.”
This story was originally published December 21, 2020 at 4:09 PM.
