Movie Night

Friday and Saturday nights of last week turned into Movies Night at The Old Gray House.  A and I went to Comanche a couple of weeks ago to see Mother, and while there I dove into cleaning out the living room corner cabinet.

It began as rearranging some books on top shelves because it’s better that I climb ladders to shove books around than my agéd mother be doing it.  So I did books on the 9-foot ceiling height shelves for a little while on the north wall, then got over to the cabinet corner and my curiosity got the best of me.  I climbed down, opened it up, and found a jumble of Stuph and So. Many. Cockroach turds.  I vacuumed up the cockroaches, pulled out the Things that were in the cabinet (Christmas ornaments, a couple of Mexican wooden vases for displaying arrangements of paper flowers … you know, the things you find in a hundred year old house that your family has lived in for more than 60 years) AND I found two boxes, one of slides and another of 8mm home movies!

I’d known the movies must exist and had been hoping they hadn’t been thrown away.  I remembered the place where I had last seen them (in a different cabinet of the living room), but someone had moved them in the intervening years.  And now I’d found them again.

With Mother’s permission I lugged movies and slides home, and Friday night I dug out my Bell & Howell Filmo Master 400 projector (made in the mid-1940s and still ticking along without a hiccup, as long as I can still find NOS bulbs for it; Sylvania and GE both quit making them in the 1970s).  I set it up on a card table, took some pictures off the wall to improvise a screen, called in L and A, and cranked the projector.

What I’d hoped for turned out to be true: I had another big archive of family stuff from the mid-1950s, a couple of years before I was born, up into the mid-’60s.  I think the newest reel (and unfortunately the most damaged) was my birthday party out at Windy Hill farm about 1966—I look to be eight or nine.  We watched trips to Monterrey and Horsetail Falls, bullfighting on the Mexican border, going out to the trans-Pecos region, to the beach (I think both Port Aransas and Port Isabel), Williamsburg and Washington DC on the way home from Dad’s insurance summer school in Hartford, and family Easters and Christmases.  We saw my brother Chris as an infant of a month or two, my brother Joe as a toddler … ALL the people and places, even celebrations with all of my grandparents (who notoriously didn’t like one another) in the same room together.  We got to watch me playing with PUPPIES! (so yeah, I did do that when I was five or about and our dachshund Willie had a litter) and drumming with my feet on the swing set to make a racket, and mostly the kind of things you got in home movies of that period.  Now that we’ve seen everything, I’m going to lug the whole box down to TAMI and get them to digitize it, which they will do for free if you allow them to keep a copy for their archive.

I went and bought a hand slide viewer Saturday morning so I could check out the slides, and they look like gonna be a trove too.  I found pictures of my uncle and cousins from before I was born, pictures of how Windy Hill (our family farm/ranch from 1933 to 2006) looked, pictures of even more trips including one from about 1974 to Puerto Rico when Dad won an insurance-company sales contest.

All the gods be thanked that mostly Dad shelled out to buy Kodachrome film instead of Ektachrome. Ektachrome’s blue and green dyes were unstable, and after sixty years nothing but the reds are left.  Fortunately I only had two small boxes like that which I had to discard; everything else is Kodachrome and probably stable for another thirty to fifty years (Paul Simon was right; it does “give you those nice bright colors”).  I haven’t figured out yet how to digitize those, or even to show them to anyone but me.  (Anybody out there still got a working Kodak Carousel projector?)

How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, Europeanized, enervated?  Fnord.