March 22, 2015
8mm movies of my father.
I used Legacybox to transfer 10 reels of 8mm movies from the early 1950s to video. An hour and 39 minutes of movies produced about 33 minutes of material that's interesting, intra-family. From that, I'm making some shorter clips. This one is, quite simply, my father, Richard Althouse.
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36 comments:
Handsome fellow, your dad, and a nice smile.
It's hard to think of my dad as an adult without a cigarette around. He taught me by consequential example what not to do.
Very nice
"I like Ike!".......
Can we talk about women in their 60s referring to their fathers as "daddy?" My aunt does it as well.
My father had hours of 16mm movies of the kids. Where they are now, I couldn't say.
Kids hated posing. This was not taken into account.
"Can we talk about women in their 60s referring to their fathers as "daddy?" My aunt does it as well."
First of all, the movie takes place in the 1950s.
Second of all, my father left this world more than 20 years ago.
Thirdly, no, we cannot talk about the feelings of older women for whom you apparently lack empathy.
Fourth, try to understand regional America.
Thank you for the link to Legacybox. Converting my dad's 200 or so 8 mm films will cost around $5,000.
This is one of those times technology makes life a little better.
Thanks for sharing.
I have videos going back to when I was 9 years old. My father was into home movies. There are movies of my grandparents who died in the 1950s.
Family treasures.
I also took a movie camera when I sailed my boat to Hawaii when my oldest son was 16. Those have also been transferred to video some of which I posted on my blog. Everybody in that video is now 50 or older and one is dead.
This is great. Thanks for sharing.
Several years ago I had my dad's super 8 film collection converted to DVD format. Some of it is of passing historical interest such as Cale Yarborough winning the1968 Firecracker 400 in Daytona and shots of an Apollo rocket under construction at the Kennedy Space Center. There are also a few movies I shot as a teen.
I'd like to know how to get them from DVD format to a slice and dice version for uploading. On a Mac of course.
A handsome man. I like the look of the bow-tie, it was a good fashion choice. The ubiquity of cigarettes was a little jarring, I did not come from a smoking family and always thought Mad Men exaggerated.
A few years back, at a family reunion, my dad hauled-out the projector and put on a bunch of family movies. My Brother-in-law filmed it with a hand-held digital camera, complete with all the audience commentary. It was great! Media transfer plus useful commentary.
iMovie on a Mac will let you do some simple editing and upload. I had another program for a while called "Final Cut Pro" but iMovie is now enough, I think. I also had a VHS tape player and a converter from the tape to digital. It was too hard to learn to use so I finally had a guy do most of it.
It is wonderful that you have such memorabilia.
My dad was a heavy smoker most of his life as well. My mom still has a portrait of him taken when he was at his first job out of law school; the photog had him holding a cigarette because he said it made him more 'relaxed' My mom insisted they retouch the picture and remove it. They did a great job by the standards of 1953, but if you look close you can see the blurring that caused.
He died young at 54 when I was 25 years old, of heart disease.
Verklempt! and I'm not even Jewish.
wow, just wow.. all I have of my dad is a couple of pictures from when I was a child.
And what a handsome man. I see him in your sons..
We are the same age, you and me, give or take a few months. I suspect our fathers were too.
Note that he is always groomed, and there are no jeans in sight. (My father didn't have any -- closest he got was khakis.). The pictures are all of a man involved with his family, which was first and foremost among his responsibilities. Partly it was the style of the age, but more importantly a product of what they had lived through. A grinding and seemingly endless Depression followed by a horrific war will do that; it forces you to grow up quickly.
This Good Friday will be the 50th anniversary of his passing. Your pictures sparked a lot of memories. Thanks for sharing. You're lucky to have these movies.
I assume that's Althouse putting on the little sour puss at the beginning because of the lights.
The lights those cameras required for indoor filming were like the flames from hell.
Besides being the second child, we have very little indoor movie film of me at a very young age because i'm told of my strong aversion to those lights.
Speaking of smoking and changing mores of risk tolerance...in the early 1960s...
I was filmed leaving the hospital after my birth. The nurse carried me to the Rambler and gave me to my mother in the front passenger seat. Mom was not wearing a seat belt (there were no seat belts in the car),
Today the hospital staff go out to your car and make sure you have a proper car seat or they will not release the infant.
Hi Ann:
Fascinating videos of your father. What is the music you picked as soundtrack?
Thanks,
Malesch
P.S. I am not Laszlo
Oh Ann,
All I have to say is this...
Honor thy Father and Mother.
You are a deeply thoughtful woman. Dad and Mom suffered for you.
XOX
My parents were having a great time, enjoying life a lot in the 50s and 60s.
The movies are all silent. The music was just something free available on YouTube.
I'm thinking that you stole his eyes....both literally, and figuratively.
He (or his movements?)comes across as both subtle and animated, which is unusual for this era of movie. I was never sure if it was the technologies available at the time or that people hadn't quite gotten used to being filmed.
"Note that he is always groomed, and there are no jeans in sight. (My father didn't have any -- closest he got was khakis.)."
Jeans were work clothes then. My father's father had struggled mightily to move beyond workingman's clothes. Not because he looked down on the workingman. Everyone in has family had been one for as long as the family memory went back. But in those days the work that went with the clothes was grindingly difficult and often lead to deterioration.
My mother once told me, "You are handsome but you will never be as handsome as your father was."
I liked that.
I don't think my father ever owned jeans.
You see him at 0:07 installing bricks (making a patio). He's wearing chinos. And smoking, of course.
Immortality by degrees. Each generation leaves more of itself behind. Before photography only very wealthy people could have their portraits painted. Now most people know what their twentieth century ancestors look like......... I think in the fifties and sixties only fairly affluent middle class people could leave behind home movies. Now every moment can be chronicled and with sound.....Perhaps next century they'll be able to download personalities onto the Internet and the carbon based life forms will be able to interact with their silicon based ancestors.......Smoking now looks foolish and self destructive. The home movies of the present generation will, perhaps, with the passage of time reveal other behaviors that are foolish and self destructive. Perhaps future generations will even be able to discover visible behavior that is not foolish and self destructive.
"Now most people know what their twentieth century ancestors look like."
How about 19th ? My grandfather was born in 1849 and I have a Daguerrotype of him at age 5 or so with his sister. My best photo of him was when he was in a play at about the age of 20 or so. That would be 1869. He die of pneumonia at 50 in 1899. My mother was 18 months old.
He looks just like his grandson, my cousin who flew in WWII. A photo of him, a tintype, when he was older shows a big handlebar mustache. Not a good likeness.
My grandfather owned movie cameras during my entire childhood. Every holiday was an occasion for him to take movies. I watch them with my mother sometimes now since she had some converted to VHS tape and she still owns a VHS player.
Looking back on it, however, I did not enjoy having every family gathering also be a time for me to perform. I have no video of my own children. Taking movies or video just seems to wreck the mood of enjoying each other's company.
I have lots of still pictures and I consider myself a pretty good photographer. To me taking still pictures does not change the mood, at least not in the same way.
"Looking back on it, however, I did not enjoy having every family gathering also be a time for me to perform. I have no video of my own children. Taking movies or video just seems to wreck the mood of enjoying each other's company."
That's affecting so many more people today.
In our family, the movie camera was a very rare thing. Unfortunately, that means the movies are almost entirely showing Christmas and significant gatherings, which means the camera is panning around looking at a lot of different people. I would prefer some longer shots of what our normal life was back then. I don't like to movies/video of children when they are in their giddy, excitement mode. What I want, 60 years later, is a moving picture of the person who existed then and an opportunity to contemplate what was in that person's mind.
"Looking back on it, however, I did not enjoy having every family gathering also be a time for me to perform."
To some extent, we are all performing at these gatherings. We're in social mode, usually constrained by wanting things to go smoothly, yet overexcited at the same time.
I don't remember being made to pose for the movie camera... other than to display Christmas presents, which is something that is so worthless in later years. There's one example of a special present being given to my brother that is of some interest... because of the evident importance to my grandfather.
I'm the same age as Althouse (and grew up a few miles away from where she was in NJ), but my parents took no movies and few pictures. You're lucky to have this stuff. Very lucky. I have limited video of my kids when they were young, but a million photos. Too many. Maybe when I retire I'll do something technological with them.
A video of my parents' parties would be a bit more restrained, but the same kind of dancing and smoking. My generation does not have the dancing at our parties - few of us can really dance.
It's honestly quite wonderful how good the video quality on cellphones is these days -- so easy to take videos of family now, and edit them up into little mementos for the future.
You can find coupons for 45-50% off Legacybox. Sign up online or like them on Facebook, and be patient.
My dad was big on getting natural conversations so he would put a tape recorder in the kitchen. Otherwise, you are right, it was always an occasion. Birthdays, holidays,trips to petting zoos and BBQs. The traditional mile marker was the first day of school. Walk down the driveway...show off this years lunch box...turn and wave at the end of the driveway...turn and wave one last time before walking out of sight. the only time it was natural was when we were too young to ham it up or follow commands.
Someone mentioned the lights and yes they were bad. I was the sensitive one. A lot of film as a baby with me seeming to say, "what's daddy doing with that thing to his face? Ow my eyes! Blinding light"
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