Great Yellow Father

He made a video "challenging the wonders of the Great Yellow Father," and sent it around to employees.

And, perhaps most traumatic for a company that was known as the Great Yellow Father in Rochester, they eliminated jobs.

The Great Yellow Father is acting like a feisty teen-ager - but in adolescence, growth has always been a painful process.

But Kodak, long known as the Great Yellow Father for its cradle-to-grave relationship with its employees, has arguably paid the highest human price.

Kodak was once known as the "Great Yellow Father" in its hometown of Rochester because of its paternalistic employment practices.

Propelled by Eastman's marketing genius, the "Great Yellow Father" held a virtual monopoly of the U.S. photographic industry by 1927.

They're still under the rule of the Great White Father they were born underor the Great Red Father or the Great Yellow Father or whatever.

Still, few analysts expect that Kodak, whose paternalistic culture once gleaned it the sobriquet of Great Yellow Father in its Rochester home, will throw the maximum number of people out of work.

The company was long known as the Great Yellow Father in its hometown because of its support of cultural, social, artistic and civic organizations, but as the company's profits have shrunk, so has its role in the community.

He was also very involved in the decision, announced in 1997, to pare as many as 19,000 jobs - a decision that would be painful for any company but that was excruciating for Kodak, which had run so paternalistic an organization that its nickname in its home town, Rochester, was "Great Yellow Father."