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?Some got scared,? Fulton says. ?We?d have to quiet them down. The mothers would have to take them off and let them watch the other kids so they knew it wouldn?t hurt. They thought it may hurt... I would tell them that it is a painless procedure.?
When the boys and girls noticed the monkey, though, this helped soothe their fears. The monkey always sat on the front of Fulton?s camera box. It was there to make a frightened child smile.
?It was a little battery-operated monkey . . . that clapped his hands,? Fulton explains. ?It was to amuse the little children. I would say ?Look at the monkey? and sometimes they would look at me.?
Fulton?s recollections of snapping high school students at proms, graduations and dances goes back to a time when the Edgewater Gulf Hotel was the most elegant place in South Mississippi.
?Some of the boys and girls who posed for those pictures are man and wife today," Fulton says. ?Some, I took their wedding pictures. That was done quite frequently. ?
His photography also started at a time when the Gulfport Post Office was brand new and a big deal on the Coast Fulton took a picture of his senior class posed in front of the downtown Gulfport building shortly after it ) was dedicated.
Nearby, Fulton would later open his first photography ' studio in 1935. His long-standing career, though, really ' began in the family clothes closet when he was 15 years ' old.
?Mom cleaned it out for me,? Fulton says of his first
Fulton as much a ? part of Coast history as his photographs
By MARIANNE DAY DUBOSE
STAFF WRITER
!
?	His favorite photograph is an old black and white one he keeps tucked in a picture slot in his wallet.	;
Lawrence Fulton decides in a flash that, of all the; thousands and thousands of photographs he has taken over the years, this one means the most to him.
?This one of my lady,? Fulton says and stares at a picture of a pretty woman wearing a plaid dress and pearls.	1
It is his wife and former business partner, Annie Lou. Next month, they will celebrate their 61st wedding anniversary.	\
Fulton elaborates on the details of this snapshot over and above those surrounding the one he took of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1927.	i
The president was passing through Gulfport on a whis-, tle-stop tour of the country when Fulton took his picture. "He stopped at the old depot,? he says. ?He was on the back of the train ... I was within 10 feet of him.? i Then there was the one of Robert Mitchum that Fulton j snapped before the actor hit his heydey.	J
?He was about three shades to the wind,? Fulton says and grins at the almost-forgotten meeting that dragged^ him out of bed late one night years ago.	j
Fulton?s youngest son, Walter, reminds him of the ( famous faces he put on film, and Fulton nods and accepts the notion that celebrities are exciting people.
But honestly, Fulton says, school children rate first in his memory. For more than 30 years, Fulton packed a custom-made box camera, tripod, suitcase and supplies into his 1941 Chevy and made his rounds of all the elementary and high schools in Harrison, Hancock, Stone and Jackson counties. He took as many as 50,000 school pictures a year.
?I think the school picture business intrigued me the most,? Fulton says.	i
?You have to have a certain knack dealing with children!^ The secret is to be friendly and patient with them.?' Sometimes their mothers would drag them into the^ auditorium with their day-old haircuts and Sunday-meeting clothes and the kids would take one look at the man standing behind this big, mechanical contraption and begin to cry. Fulton, a family man himself, would remain unflus- I tered. He says he can?t recall even one nasty-little-kid
story.
....-J