And the View Through My Father's Lense
My father was creative. Besides being an aeronautical engineer, a licensed pilot, and an artist, he liked taking photographs and making home movies. Had he been a bit younger when video and computer technology came along he would have really enjoyed chronicling the life of our little family. As it was he used 16 mm cameras, the first of which was a windup camera, an 8 mm camera later in life, and to a limited extent a video camera, one of the huge clunky ones which my youngest used to tape his sister’s 30th birthday several years ago.
My inheritance is reels and reels of film. Twelve of them are home movies on 16 mm film. In the 1980s I had two reels he turned loose of put on video tape. It was lovely to see the old movies again, but the music the company inserted into the old silent home movies was cheesy. Actually, it is so tacky that it is beginning to become a bit campy now, but when discussion of putting the rest onto DVD came up my son had the bright idea of skipping the music and simply adding the sound of a movie projector. I liked the idea.
Enter
FloridaHomeMovie.com. Almost immediately Jean Marcotte emailed me that there would be no problem. They’d actually done it before. She acted like it was the most natural thing in the world. Not wanting to risk these old movies to my own packing skills I carted them to Mail Plus for professional packing and giving over to Brown for the trip to Florida Home Movies. Jean Marcotte told me that the turnaround time is between two and three weeks and not to be nervous as they would be careful with my memories.
Many of us grew up with parents, particularly fathers, who owned cameras of one variety or another and who documented our childhoods in 8 or 16 mm film or 35 mm slides. For Baby Boomers parents are passing away and the films are aging. If not preserved someday a piece of American history, that of the Cold War Era, will pass away, too.
