My mother has finally taken the home movies and had them placed on videotape and on my parents’ 50th anniversary we watched the footage of their wedding day. Part of it was shot by a cousin, who seemed a) entranced with cars and b) indifferent to people’s heads. “I guess we know why he lost that football scholarship to Auburn,” my father remarked.
When my sister and I were kids, we watched these movies a lot and the family lore is that I kept asking plaintively when I would show up. My sister was my grandparents’ first grandchild and just about the most beautiful child who ever drew a breath. A stranger once took her photograph in the supermarket and gave it to my mother. She also was always dressed exquisitely, in dresses that she kept immaculate. Add in the fact that my family left Atlanta when I was only 2, and the disproportionate footage is logical.
As an adult, I found I was rooting for myself not to show up. I remember me and I know what I looked like. (Not unlike Augustus Gloop, in the original “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” drawings, sad to say. Same mouth, for sure.) But how heavenly it was to see my mother’s mother, who was probably my age on her daughter’s wedding day. Mary Moore Mabry, aka “Big Mama,” died in 1978. She was a great beauty, but the camera caught something more — her grace, her very Southern charm.
It also was fun seeing my very young, very thin parents, often with cigarettes. I especially liked watching my mother adjust my sister on the rocking horse, a burning cigarette dangling close to my sister’s hair. And there was my sister’s dance recital, when she wasn’t quite 4. Her costume was one of the most prized outfits in our “dress-up” box, a unitard with sequins and a tutu. Do little girls still play dress-up?
If you could uncover a cache of video from your family, who would you want to see, at what age? Or is there a home movie that you particularly cherish?
As the second child, you are not alone in not finding pictures of yourself. The same thing happened to my sister. J
I have several boxes of old home movies that I’ve been meaning to have transferred to DVD. This is going to sound awfully sentimental, but I cherish them all.
Both my parents passed away from cancer (my father when I was 16 and my mother 2 years ago, when I was 32), and the recorded interactions between all of us are priceless.
It’s easy to remember childhood disappointments, but these videos are a terrific reminder of how good my childhood actually was. They’re also good for a laugh at the 70s fashions that were *so* cool at the time.
I love watching the home movies of my parents. They lived in a trailer park with lots of other young, married couples. They were all just starting out and poor as church mice but seemed to be having fun. After we kids came along, the movies seem to follow the same sequence. Each reel has Christmas, Easter, maybe a birthday party and then the first day of school. As a second child, there are fewer photos of me than my sister, but I do show up in the film footage.
I actually have a decent “baby book” — my mother kept it up through my kindergarten years. It includes my first “novel,” a self-published effort and clippings about my father’s jobs.
I particularly cherish my birth announcement from the Sparta (Ga) Ishmaelite. I wonder why that name went out of favor for newspapers.
And then there’s that tantalizing line on my kindergarten report card: “We are happy to report that Laura leaves kindergarten a much more confident child.”
My parents flipped film to video a few years ago, and the home movie I was most fascinated by was a May procession at the Catholic school in the parish that I attended. Those who are not practicing or recovering Catholics may not know about May processions (do they still do them?), which were held in honor of Mary, the mother of Jesus. It was a long, slow, silent walk from the school to the church, and once there, you said a bunch of prayers and sang hymns to the Blessed Mother. Ripping good times, they were.
Watching the movies made me remember how inbred everyone was in our part of the world – not inbred like *inbred*, but this was a largely Catholic suburb of Philadelphia in the 60s, so everyone had a bunch of kids in their family, all who seemed to have known one another. I am one of four, seven years apart from youngest to oldest, and I watched the video with at least a couple of people in my family. It seemed while watching the home movie of the May procession that we could namecheck *everyone* who went by, because we were in their grade, or a sibling had played basketball with them, or my mom was their Girl Scout cookie mother. It was a really cool reminder of that cocoon in which I had grown up, about how natural it was to know everyone, and how easily so many memories of a breezy May day came back to me.
PS – Laura, if you are reading this: I have a few hours to kill in Baltimore tomorrow before I meet friends who live there. Any suggestions of what I should do besides pig out on Berger Cookies (I have to meet folks near Johns Hopkins in the late afternoon). Thanks for any suggestions.
There are no home movies of any of us, I don’t think anyone had one of those moving picture cameras back then.
When my mother passed away about 5 years ago my sister sent me a box of things that my mother had been keeping. It had some pictures of me at different stages one on a shetland pony dressed up like a little cowgirl. In the 40s and 50s there were people who went around with their ponies and little western outfits to dress up kids in and they sold the pictures to the parents. It was a lucrative business back then. Of course at the time I never thought about that aspect of the experience. And she kept a lot of my school work. Apparently I excelled in the sciences. I can vaguely remember wanting to be some kind of scientist when I was a kid. There were also a few pictures of my aunt and uncle and grand parents although not any of my great grand parants who I knew for the first ten or so years of my life. Oh and one really cool baby picture of me. Everything else is just in my memories.
There are no home movies of me. I do remember wondering when I was a kid why my family was the only one that didn’t take home movies. In fact, I’m still wondering about that.
I do, however, have vivid May Procession movies running in my head and memories of the annual pre-procession guessing about what kid was going to faint. It was a given that someone would.
Can anyone explain why the May processions were so worthy of being memorialized on film? We have several on our home movies too. There is a wonderful shot of my sister, who must have been about 3 at the time, bursting away from my mother’s grasp and trying to tackle our 9 year old next-door neighbor. The poor guy was oblivious to her approach, since he was intently walking in the procession along the course set by the nun in charge.
We also have an assortment of late 1950′s era movies of 4th of July parades in Dundalk, a Baltimore suburb. Anyone remember Hamm’s Beer? They seemed to always have very elaborate floats. And the scene showing the Colts cheerleaders in their cowgirl outfits recalls the innocence of the period.
Our movies say as much about the man behind the camera, as they portray those of us in front. My father was an iron worker for a time, and we have many minutes of film showing various bridges. At least some of the shots are of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, but there are others that none of us can identify, nor do we care about them. We want to see people, not bridges.
Wow-the Dundalk 4th of July parade! (I haven’t thought of it in a long time, this Memory Project thing works.)
I was in attendance throughout most of the 60s. A longlasting family tale (retold way too often as far as I’m concerned) was my several day tantrum with alternating pout demanding white boots, just like the ones I saw the majorettes (or could it have been the Colts cheerleaders-did they have white boots?) wear in the parade. Apparently, at age 3 or 4 I had real ambitions to wear white boots and twirl a baton. My family never let me live it down.
Interestingly, I have no memory of Hamm’s beer but I do vividly recall the white boots. (Could it be that hearing the story so much just fixed a memory in my head?)
Diane, I recall many of the majorette groups of that era wearing white boots, and some wore a tap attached to their boots so that their feet made a clicking noise when they did their routines. I think the Colts cheereleaders of that period also wore white boots, at least in the parade.
As for Hamm’s beer, I don’t recall seeing their floats in person either. Those particular movies date back to the period before I was born. The one unit that sticks out in my mind from the 1960′s parades is the Wise Avenue Volunteer Fire Department, because one of their trucks would pull a boat with a scuba diver on it. I must have been thinking “Why does a fire department need a boat, and why is a boat in a parade?”
No home movies in my family, and generally underdocumented childhoods as well–I think my mom was far too busy with full-time job and 3 kids to bother with such things. There are some rather priceless written pieces my brothers and I did in elementary school, though. A box reemerged recently that my brothers and I read through with horrified amusement… One of my brothers had done an assignment that involved writing a 5-6 sentence description (with drawing) of each family member and then putting them all together in a little book. There was only one slot for a sibling and so I was completely left out, as his twin obviously took precedence! The description of our mother included the observation “my mother hates making beds”; the description of our father was even more horrifying and touching, I can’t remember the exact wording but it was all sentences like “My father hates noise” and “My father gets angry when we go on long car rides”! I can only imagine what the teacher must have thought. When I read through my own stuff, I was taken aback by the force of my obsession with animals at that age–hearing your own thoughts given back to you like that is in a way more disconcerting than any movie. I suppose this also raises interesting questions about how you see yourself versus how others see you–we will always be more struck by how different a parent looks at a younger age than by pictures of our own younger self–though I also am reminded of a comment my brother made about what I have always thought of as a particularly hideous picture of me aged 13. He was showing the scant childhood pictures to his girlfriend, and said of this one (a black-and-white photo which has me looking extremely mousy and sulky in sweatshirt and jeans with an unflattering floppy short haircut), “Isn’t this cool? Jenny looks like an IRA revolutionary!”
Another fascinating artifact was one of those old reel-to-reel tape recorders–we used to play with it when we were little, and it turned out we’d accidentally recorded this long rambling conversation between the three of us aged about 8–pretty surreal to listen to now.
No home movies at my house, either — but we do have boxes of old photos. The sad thing is that we grew up physically and emotionally distant from our extended family (we lived in CA, Mom’s family was in PA, and Dad’s family was in Montana and parts beyond); as few of the photos are labeled, they are rapidly becoming the equivalent of random shots of strangers. I envy those of you more connected to your own pasts!
I’ve always loved the home movies my grandfather took at family gatherings. Everyone’s heads are cut off because he was concentrating on the food on the table, so we have a lot of Swedish meatballs, smoldering cigarettes and my grandmother’s large breasts in the films.
Yes, Laura, little girls still play dress up. My daughter is 8, and she and her friends constantly prance around the house in my 14 year old niece’s castoff sequined dance recital outfits.
<i>Or is there a home movie that you particularly cherish?</i>
The one of my brother (who died at age 8) carrying me.
My boys got a bunch of extra kisses after that.
Not that I can really tell which ones are extra.