Grateful to my uncle and his moving picture camera

I had two boxes worth of old home movies converted last month into a format compatible with 21st century technology. 

My uncle Jack owned the camera — he had a passion for gadgets. Most of the reels of film were shot in the 1940s and 1950s. 

 I spent hours last week immersed in images that likely haven’t been seen in decades — possibly even since they were shot. 

While Jack would never have won any awards for filmmaking, what he did succeed in doing was capturing tidbits of daily life — fragments often only a second or two long. 

Many of those fragments were taken near the house where I still live. It was my grandparents’ home then, and the clan gathered here regularly. 

Since movie cameras were a novelty, much of the footage is of various friends and relatives -- from my whisper-thin grandmother to gap-toothed cousins and youthful aunts and uncles — all grinning and waving at the camera. 

There is a generous smattering of clips of my bachelor dad in his signature black felt hat — “Cowboy Jim” to decades of little kids — patiently shuffling an array of squirming, beaming tots into and out of a saddle on the back of a surprisingly patient horse. 

The main horse for dude ranch duty in these movies was named Doubtful. Family lore says he earned the name because if you were mounted on him, it was doubtful your journey would end on a positive note. 

In reality, Doubtful was a pretty safe bet for inexperienced riders, for the most part anyway. 

He did have a couple of signature tricks. 

One was to slowly and deliberately place one of his hooves squarely atop the toe of a kid who stood too close, and then freeze like a statue with complete disregard of the screams and flailing fists of his victim, an act that could only be ended with adult intervention. 

Doubtful also learned that his smallest riders were also the easiest to gently unseat (I don’t think he ever seriously hurt anyone). He perfected a maneuver where he walked with his front legs and trotted with his back legs, a rough gait almost guaranteed to dislodge unsuspecting pixies. 

For better or for worse, Jack’s movies only captured Doubtful at his saintliest, a model of equine tolerance and compassion. 

But then again, these movies seemed to have captured most of the subjects at their saintliest: my frail aunt Jo stealing a kiss from her new husband, my laughing aunt Katie showing off a blanket-wrapped baby who was the first grandchild born in the family, my grandma coming out onto her porch with the sweetest of smiles. 

What I wouldn’t give to crawl through the screen and be with them all for an afternoon, take a ride on Doubtful, hug my grandma, and eat a slice of juicy yellow-meat watermelon. 

But how grateful I am that my gadget-loving uncle invested in that new-fangled moving picture camera and toted it to the most ordinary of days. 

An hour and 43 minutes of corny smiles and goofy waves? Priceless. 

Betty Williamson plans a summer of popcorn and old movie reruns. Reach her at:

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