8mm film a fine format for memory lane

According to the grainy 8 mm film evidence we just had converted to digital, my childhood lasted six hours.

Well, that's not entirely true. Sister Sally, firstborn child in an age of 8 mm technology and Kodak processing by mail, got most of the six hours of our home-movies extravaganza. Second-born Nancy logged maybe a third as much screen time. I had a few minutes of newborn time, another minute or two during my toddler years spent under a floppy cowboy hat with a six-shooter in my hand, a quick shot of my sixth-and-only birthday party and an extended cameo or two when our little brother, Bill, landed starring roles in our family movies about the age of 4 and then again about age 7.

That was just about perfect.

Years ago, Bill talked about converting our home movies to videotape. He stored the small reels of film in boxes for a decade or so while he waited for a technology better than video. After Bill died of bile duct cancer last year at age 48, we found the box of movies, had them converted to digital and thought watching them again would be therapeutic and fun.

So, last weekend, my sisters and I visited Mom on the family farm in Goodland, Ind., to watch those old home movies we hadn't seen since the 1970s. I loved family movie nights when I was a kid, not so much for the footage on the screen but for the spectacle.

We'd drag the metal movie screen stand from the front closet and unfurl its white screen above its spindly, metal legs. Dad would make his famous popcorn. Mom would settle with all of us kids in prime spots on the couch. Dad would thread the brittle, sometimes broken, film through the mechanical labyrinth of an already ancient Bell & Howell projector that looked like something out of “War of the Worlds.” When he was set, he'd yell, “Lights!” and one of us kids would hit the switch, leaving the living room dark except for the flickering film. As soon as we saw the black dots appear on screen signaling the end of each 3-minute film, the call for “Lights!” would sound and Dad would rewind the film.

Sometimes the film would break or even catch fire from the hot projector bulb, making Dad sound the “Lights!” alarm in mid-movie.

Now we watch the movies on a flat-screen TV in the den, the same room where Dad was born in 1916 and died in 2003. In his honor, we make microwave popcorn that provides the smell, but not quite the taste, of the popcorn we remembered as kids.

The movies surprise us. All of us kids seem cuter than we remembered. Mom, wearing dresses and pearls in almost every film, has a glamour and grace that would have given Jackie Kennedy a run for her money. Dad looks so young and handsome, whether wearing a sports jacket on our family trip to Washington, D.C., or even when brandishing one of those Old Gold cigarettes he quit cold turkey in 1968.

In memories of my boyhood, I was a natural, graceful athlete along the lines of Bears star Gale Sayers. That four-decade-old fantasy is undone by 12 seconds of grainy footage of me kicking a football. A very brief shot of me playing basketball, even though I made a shot, undercuts my memory of me being a young version of Purdue star Rick Mount. I am thankful nobody filmed me playing baseball.

We remark how the aunts and uncles and grandparents are all dead now but look so young, healthy and well-dressed in our movies. People got dressed up a half-century ago, whether they were going to a Memorial Day parade or taking a trip on a prop airplane. We remember the clothes we wore in those movies, from fringed leather vests or fuzzy winter coats to all the outfits mom made. We remember Dusty the horse, Fury the pony and dogs such as Taffy, Patsy and Fred, while anonymous cats, random puppies and a short-lived stray dog my brother and I named Sniffer fail to illicit the “aah” of recognition from all.

We spend two nights and part of an afternoon watching the home movies. We hope to do it again someday with all the cousins who show up often on screen.

But it makes me feel sorry for our kids. A few hours of old 8 mm tapes stuffed in a musty Kodak box served up just the right amount of memories for us. Today's kids have dozens if not hundreds of hours of images collected on formats from compact DVDs to digital and stored in various computer hard drives and portable USB storage devices. Years from now, when the next generation wants to revisit their childhood, it's going to take more than a weekend.