Once upon a time, when I had a weekly show on WMAR-TV, the producers and I put a call out for home movies - not videos, but the 8 mm and Super8 film packed in shoe boxes and stored away in attics, closets and garages all over Baltimore.
Once upon a time, people made home movies - reel after reel of them - and especially at family gatherings during the holidays. In 1998, we wanted to see some and air segments on our show, to present a picture of a bygone Baltimore.
The response was quite strong. We ended up with more film than Universal. People all over the metropolitan area said they were eager to see their home movies again. Most had not viewed them in years; they had no projector that worked, and all but a few considered the prospect of transferring their home movies to video too expensive a project. They'd be most grateful if the TV station would do it.
Viewers dropped off hours and hours of film at the station. And it took hours and hours for Channel 2's video technicians to prepare samples of the home movies for telecast. I have always been glad we went to the trouble.
What we finally ended up with were not only moving portraits of Baltimore families at Hanukkah, Christmas and New Year's, but amazing street scenes of the city back in the day - in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s: Howard Street storefronts, a Christmas parade, Ednor Gardens and Edmondson Village decked out in holiday lights. This was a Baltimore I had only heard about and never seen, except in black-and-white stills from this newspaper's amazing archive.
What was different, of course, was life - men and women and children moving and gesturing, smiling and speaking (though none of the home movies came with a soundtrack.)
All of the home movies were in color. People walked through scenes in the fashions of the day, each decade distinctive - men in suits with wide lapels and short but splashy ties, women with elaborate curls in their hair and dresses with padded shoulders and shoes with ankle straps. Everyone wore a hat, it seemed - men in smart fedoras, women in a wide array of millinery styles of all angles and shapes - until the late 1960s.
Home movies from the holidays were classic - girls with dolls, boys with air rifles, fake paper fireplaces in club basements, skinny uncles in really bad Santa masks.
Some of the movies contained scenes from other family events - vacations, in particular, and, in one case, the 1958 All-Star game at Memorial Stadium and, in another, a soldier arriving home from the Korean War.
