AV Geeks (not) @ Hunt Library 6-29-2020

everyone and welcome back to a bee geeks at the hunt library not at the hunt library I'm Jason Evans Brothe I'm the digital media librarian at North Carolina State University Libraries for the learning spaces and services department and welcome back thank you for hanging out with us over the last several weeks while we move this to a virtual world where we can be in cool rooms with cooler stuff but maybe not cooler than what we see in a library but certainly more characteristic of our individual needs rather than a 10 projector rooms that you can't possibly have at home if you do have one at home let us know we'll do next semesters work at your house so this is our 11th semester of the series we partner NCS you folks with Raleigh's a/v geeks a specifically skip Alzheimer to discuss vintage educational and classroom films skip whose name you'll hear all night is the head of ABG expounder of a/v geeks an NC State alum he's been for the last several decades collecting films made throughout the last century mostly on 16 millimeter mostly educational training and other sorts of how to movies he's awesome he does a great job sharing them and providing access to them and to the world he houses over 27,000 of these objects and films at the a/v geeks archive right here in Raleigh and shares them as stock footage for films and exhibits research material and during public events like this and tonight's theme is travel and we're very excited to welcome our guest dr. Tammy Gordon dr. Gordon is director of public history and a professor of history at NC State University her new book is called the mass production of memory travel and personal archiving in the age of the Kodak and it will be out November and this is dr. Gordon's second appearance with us at AV geeks of the hunt library so welcome back um while a quick PSA while there are over 200 of 80 geeks compilation videos at available for checkout while the NC State University Libraries are open we are not open right now but instead you can visit AV geeks comm or search for AV geek sin you tube recorder archive.org and watch them watch some movies thousands of them there this is the last show of the summer so again thanks for adapting to this model and for tuning in we've had a great time and we'll be back when school starts up again in August but let's not wish it away instead skip why don't you take it from here and thank you thanks Jason and Tammi do you want to say something just so people can see your your face blue nice to be here thank you for inviting me awesome so we the way we've been doing this is a hodgepodge of various types of meeting technologies and so I'm doing something crazy tonight that might blow up in our face not literally but virtually so when I heard that Tammy was gonna be our guest our host or our expert I was like you know she's doing something about tourism she's doing something about photography and so I kind of started looking for tourism films which we have several and I know of some online but I was like wait a minute home movies home movies have so much about that document vacationing documenting travel why don't we show some home movies and I helped do a home movie day every year actually I do several in a year I've already done two so far and so what what a better way to talk about people vacationing and doing road trips than to actually show them from different times in our lives and this first film is actually it's a mentor of mine Rick Prelinger who has a vast archive himself but he also compiled a great film called no more road trips which basically shows people going on road trips circa 30s 40s 50s 60s and what we're gonna do is watch it and then we're gonna sense it's silent we can talk about it Tammy and I and then if you have questions or things you want to point out or ask either Tammy or myself then write it in the comments on Facebook or YouTube and we will come around to those questions so are we ready to to travel are we anybody alright alright here we go so I'm gonna do some crazy zoom stuff here first and then we're gonna make this all work it's absolutely insane so this is no more road trips and Rick shows this film silent and encourages people to comment out loud but since most of you can't comment out loud um would love to read your comments and what you have to talk about so let me do a little bit more magic here well damn let me em all right here we go no more road trips and so this is Rick collects home movies that he finds at yard sales he finds at thrift stores on eBay at film labs that have gone defunct and so he transferred these films and then compiled this miss footage I like this this clip of this family reason he's he's focused on reading his Red Rider comic book while the mom lectures about history and I believe them believe this is Lexington Concord a famous historic site and in the post-war period and many families got on the road and and looked at historic sites there was a new imperative in that period I given them building tensions of the color to go to historic sites for as like a patriotic duty and then this little guy gets a new camera oh it's so cute so picture taking and tourism had been connected since being the first Kodak in 1888 by the Eastman Kodak Company it was one of their main marketing tools it was to promote the Kodak as a travel camera and they promoted it as a tool that modern people would use along with the car and the train to have family experiences and to see the world around them so somebody asks a question is dad holding the camera and in your experiences Tammy who held the camera who took the pictures that is a great question thank you so much for that so it often times according to the Kodak marketing and it was supposed to be women who were the culture keepers and we were often pictured with the cameras in their advertising now in the post-war period with the moving film it was often as usually the dad who was interested in that and though that technology was considered perhaps too sophisticated for women to handle but in the earlier period that the Kodak promoted its still cameras and with the tagline you press the button then we do the rest right so it was presented as something that was not technologically sophisticated unlike the moving image which a camera which was more sophisticated interesting has something happened with our clip I'm getting just a little slice of it um I'm not quite sure Oh actually I think I know what's going on everyone hold on this is this is that technology problem that I was talking about earlier you see it it's back and one of the things you see a lot in vacation snaps as well as videos is travel infrastructure right so you get a lot of pictures out plain windows and you get a lot of videos of moving down the road and and you also get a lot of evidence of roadside America so the restaurant the service stations and all of those roadside attractions right they grew up as the interstate highway system grew especially after 1956 with the Federal Highway Act of 1956 which was also called the National interstate and defense highways Act because it was funded thinking that people could get out of cities quickly if there was a nuclear attack so that's a part of the Cold War history that facilitated and domestic mobility in a post period so this is footage or watching of Times Square which has always been you know this visually stunning light show so somebody's asking the question when did color film become prevalent and I mean I know technically when it came prevalent but when do you feel the consumer started adopting that and thinking it was important it's in still pictures or well just yeah because yeah you either way you know what yeah that's a great question you know probably um and please skip correct me unnecessary and I'm probably mass consumer adoption of color film was probably around the 1950s even though the cynic Kodak was out around 1919 is that correct yeah I mean there were all these different types of color schemes that Kodak was trying like they had kodacolor which was this odd thing with you had different lenses and red green and blue but you know it's it's when they were able to make this system that was actually inexpensive and easy to shoot and that was I feel like definitely in the 50s for still photography I would say it starts showing up in the 40s is motion picture photography it was more expensive obviously right right right these are these things that were usually adopted by a wealthier class but oh there's the George Eastman House photography which you can you can visit you can still visit that today you know and I took a selfie of bum with the daguerreotype of Louie de Guerre so this layer of photographic geekery that can happen at the Eastman House today that's in Rochester New York yes and here you can see a lot of the roadside America that I was talking about the de esos station right so a lot of that was built up around the new roads and so a lot of states started investing in roads supported by automobile associations in the 1920s but that roadside stuff that you see was really building up by the 40s and 50s here we see a visit to the Capitol and this is a little later from the 70s and I wanted to talk you can see two African American children in front of the Lincoln statue and so African Americans had a difficult time traveling in in the United States because of segregation and they had to draw on resources like the Green Book which was started by Victor green in 1936 to help African American travelers find services because of segregation so after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and which forbade um discrimination even though it was still a practice and a lot of the trouble industry started targeting African American consumers and so that's a part of our travel history that's really important to consider when we're looking at videos and when we're looking at photographs because not everybody had the same access to public space to be comfortable filming themselves and their families and so that's affected the archive that we have about travel you can see the interstate system there in the background the famous cloverleaf um kind of design there's a toll booth mm-hmm in all class Howard Johnson they would you know chains like this also became more common as more people were moving around and things like Howard Johnson's Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's and started to appeal to consumers because they knew what to expect but I think these gentlemen ate more than McDonald's I think I think they had a few before this I think there was some some more going on what's interesting Tammy is I transfer a lot of home movies for people and it seems like there's these giant road trips that where they span almost you know they go from their home all the way to an edge of the country like they go from where they live in Virginia all the way up to Niagara Falls and they hit the similar places on the way so they go to historic Williamsburg they go to DC they go to maybe Gettysburg they go you know to New York go to Philadelphia then they make their way up to Niagara Falls and then eventually go across to Canada briefly and that um that style of travel has pretty deep roots in the United States and you know in the late late 18th and early 19th century people believed that if you had too much leisure right it would sort of undermine the morality of the citizenry and so when people had to be convinced to take leisure right and so one of the things when leisure became or when leisure travel became more available because of the trains and the track system and they started to frame their tourism as sort of like work right you're very busy you're going from place to place as a child is sick I've seen worse at home so that sort of go to seem as many places as you can I didn't throw them at a time appeal to American sense of themselves as a busy people right right I mean it's actually made fun of in national lampoon's vacation yes dad wanting to take the kids across the country to see all these different things and to see family on route to something that they could just fly to it seems like it falls out of favor definitely by the 80s mm-hmm you know became a cultural trope the family vacation I mean since the 19th century and when you know there was more emphasis on childhood right and and consumerism and and travel really allowed people to express themselves culturally the express themselves in terms of those cultural values or I need your family on the road right um and one historian has called a certain sessions row has called it the golden 1950s the Golden Age of the family vacation but it's after that that people started to see that wasn't always fun to go from place to place and be cooked up in a car with your family which is where we get the chubby cheese movies you can see people visiting a lot of different places that you wouldn't expect you know um people used to in the 19th century people used to visit institutions cemeteries and you know schools they would even go to work places right and go down in a mine you know so so you see places that we're a little bit different than what you would think of as a tourist attraction now we might go to a decommissioned divine right or a decommissioned I'm school or institution but we don't tend to just hop but in there where the action is today but you've got an interesting presidential shrine going on there camping site and what's interesting is there's there's this amazing footage of Henry Ford doing a road trip very early on like he would bring motion picture film and he would shoot the road trip that he took and how he would he would meet up with different artists and different writers and different people of industry as he camped and made his way across the u.s. so this road trip thing is and in documenting in film is actually has been happening since there's been cars and since there's been film absolutely that goes back to the you know the 19th century travel narrative it was a more popular book than novel or you know the type of fun and riding right it was more popular than novels and in the 19th century so these things were it's very popular and and then um you know people would also even even earlier um there was Pompey OPA Tony and in Italy who made himself famous he lived from 1700 8 to 1787 and he made himself famous by painting portraits of travelers who came to Italy usually from England for their Continental tour you know so so self documentation um three days film by Graham with time and he soon would have been hunting for mushrooms I hope they have a good field guide but autumn camping was something that a more working class and lower middle class travelers picked up I'm in the 19th right in the by the 1920s and 1930s it was a cheaper way to go about and have a tourist experience without having to pay the expensive hotels oh boy you just turned into but young man that's adorable [Laughter] all right okay so we're back a so I asked you were there particular sites that you were interested in us showing that might you can talk about and I found you had mentioned basically historic Williamsburg and then the other one was green fill what was this second one the Claudia Lynchburg in Greenfield Village right that's right all right I could not find the village one there were some mentions of it and I know that I have it in a industrial film but it's not home movies and I'm sure that there's home movies of it out there in fact I remember visiting it as a kid like when we my mom took us to Detroit for some reason I remember going to that that the village but I couldn't find that but historic Williamsburg man you can't swing a stick without finding historic Williamsburg so I tried to find one that was one of the earliest ones I could find and this one is part of a compilation reel that was made in the 30s and 40s and unfortunately there's not a demarcation of when this took place but this is their visit they made their way down from Midwest and they were making their way through Virginia so let's watch some of this this is a family-room tripped and let me share this let me change it over here alright here we go actually wait a minute this is not the one I wanted to show hold on say sorry sorry everybody let's try that again that's that's the full one we got to briefly visit power yeah power incorporated unincorporated let me find alright where is it [Music] [Music] all right I see what I did okay I look you guys aren't seeing all this but it's it's hilarious how many tabs I have open on this computer right now okay here we go this is it alright so this is their starting in Kentucky and I guess they found some Kentucky whiskey and they're making their way across the Appalachians I think that's some tobacco now we're in Colonial Williamsburg here so this was a remind me again skip what was the year of this bill it's I want to say this was in the 40s it was a part of a compilation reel so it was like late 30s early 40s okay so Colonial Williamsburg was a I guess a preservation project that was started in the 1920s actually and they decided they would they would take down all buildings that predated 1790 and redo them for visitors and this was funded by john d rockefeller and and it was and they the preservation was coordinated by a bunch of different I'm sort of genealogy based groups like the Colonial Dames you know United Daughters of Confederacy which is another genealogical group interested in history and preservation and you can see these some these living history we call living history folks today and who would dress up in the clothing of the time and and sometimes they would talk as if they you know didn't know of the present and so which which created some awkwardness but Colonial Williamsburg is considered an open-air museum and it was supposed to instruct people and the country's founding but also inspire them with patriotism all right so we're back so briefly cloning wounds birds in trouble is that correct nowadays I don't know I can't speak to that okay well but nobody wants to go to it anymore that the the novelty of seeing how people lived in the sixteen seventeen hundred's is no longer interesting to kids or their parents and so there's kind of struggling it's true well it's a it's a major operation you know it's again I'm not sure how many visitors that they have but it's also a major preservation job right because uh all of these houses were redone in the 20s and 30s you know so now the recreations are themselves the product in the nineteen twenty and then it's it's really in 30s and it's hard to it's hard to keep that stuff going right and you know no we're just kind of over the artifice right that you really can travel in time and it also in the 1990s was it was one of the first to experiment with getting visitors to talk about slavery the system of slavery and enslaved people and it's famous for having a living history and reenactments of a slave auction right which which you can imagine would be problematic on on many levels and so um sites like this that were built around nostalgia for a past that didn't exist and you know they tended to in visitors now are going to react differently than they did in the 1950s right um and so not that the interpretation has not changed clothing a Williamsburg is is constantly trying to innovate and provide something that the visitors will want seen at the same time be true to the history but it's very difficult to do you can't you can't time travel all right just that you know the people there the people who are visiting are never going to to be a part of that time and you know we David Lowenthal who wrote a book by this name said the past is a foreign country right so so you just no matter what you're not going to get everything about the past and so this is one of the reasons why living history and it is difficult to pull off for contemporary visitors interesting so this next film that we have is has narration to it and let me set it up a little bit basically this film oh and somebody actually is mentioning Disney in the comments um this is called Disneyland dream this was made by a filmmaker named Robbins Barstow and he was an amateur filmmaker he didn't really do this professionally and he had been show me shooting home movies and little amateur films since he was a teenager and so his family won a trip thanks to scotch tape to the opening of Disneyland and so he documents it and this is a really fascinating look it's beautifully shot it's in Kodachrome so the color is stunning and what he did is he shot the film and then they edited it then he would put on these shows in his backyard where scores of people would show up and so the idea was it and then he would narrate as they watch the film and he had this kind of pattern down and this is something I don't know if you ran across this Tammy B the itinerant filmmaker who would tour around in lecture and show movies that they had shot in different countries that was a popular thing that was in the in the 20s 30s 40s is that you know somebody would go on a safari they would shoot all this footage that would edit it together and then they would tour the country and go to you know so civic groups and universities and give these tours and make you know pretty good amount of money so this is what he did on a amateur level but it's uh it captures this amazing part of when Disneyland opened and you know what it was like to visit LA at that time and what it was like to travel at that time and the fact he talks about in this narration he talks about how they had to scrimp and save to do this you know they won the trip but they didn't win you know everything - that could take all their kids so that's part of this what I think is fascinating about this and this film was entered into the National Film registry as this amazing document of you know the time and the place and what it was like to visit Disneyland in to you know travel at that time so we want to watch some early Disneyland I should say that in posting this online somebody watched it and found themselves in it as one of the employees it was a little it was someone who looked and said yeah I used to work there when I was a kid and he has like a striped like peppermint striped suit and I think he's selling programs or something and it was Steve Martin so Steve Martin found himself in this film and this is why I think Co movies are so interesting because they capture not only the family but they capture what was happening in what was going on at the time and so here's Disneyland dream like I said it has a narration so we'll talk more about this at the end so enjoy let me get to the right tab though all right enjoy the three Barstow children of Wethersfield Connecticut Mary on the Left Daniel in the center and David on the right shared with their parents Robinson Meg Barstow a great enthusiasm for the kind of family fun generated in the 1950s by Walt Disney's or early television programs which they loved to watch together in the living room when they saw outside the Main Street drugstore you know Wethersfield a contest announcement of 25 free family trips to Disneyland sponsored by scotch brand cellophane tape they realized that here was a way they could make an impossible dream come true so they want not just one but six rolls of scotch tape and the whole family set to work David made a three-dimensional model of Disneyland castle using scotch tape Mary created a scotch word puzzle young daniel copied his own words right on the official entry form and meg was inspired to write a poem about scotch tape I used alphabet soup letters to spell out an acronym finally we carefully wrapped each of these tension getting entries plus a photo of all five of us using scotch tape in a large carton and mailed it by special delivery to the contest sponsors in st. Paul Minnesota we knew we had to make our entries really stand out if we were going to have any chance of winning in this nationwide contest reportedly entered by over 1 million people then came the long wait and a return to ordinary activities like mowing the lawn with the help of other neighborhood residents and mowing the boys hair in the front yard to help keep family expenses down it really didn't hurt at that time we had a little pet parakeet named binky and we all kept trying to teach it to say where's the scotch tape where is the scotch tape then one day in June binky seemed to see sent something special in the air and sure enough a telegram was being delivered to our house this looked important so the whole family gathered outside the front door for me to open the envelope it was from the president of the Minnesota mining and manufacturing company and it read congratulations on being one of the winners in the Scotch brand Disneyland contest unbelievably our dream was really going to come true meg was the next member of the family to read the telegram it said that a company representative would get in touch with us the next week to make arrangements then it was eleven year old Mary's turn to be overcomed way to start a summer vacation when eight year old David got to look at it he also was grounded telegram actually was addressed to four year old Danny the youngest who wasn't really able to read it but who nevertheless went head over heels at the news talk about being black out and seeing stars It was as if there were a whole sky full of fireworks exploding on the 4th of July it didn't take us long to recover however we were one of 25 families across the United States who had won this fabulous prize for a free week-long trip to California and we wanted to be the first family to get there so the kids lined up with their Mickey Mouse Club hat shirts with their names on them and airline travel bags actually we had to wait till the 3ms representative personally delivered to Danny our airplane tickets and $300 in cash for meals and incidentals Danny's winning entry was the simplest of all I like scotch brand cellophane tape because when some things tear then I can just use it the date set for our departure was Wednesday July 11th both the Hartford Courant and the Hartford Times carried photo stories about us which our friends and neighbors excitedly shared with us the headlines read Danny for Labor's long wins vacation for family and ten words written by four-year-old wins family trip to Disneyland Mike had previously made for each member of the family a brightly colored Davy Crockett jacket which we used on camping trips we ought to be great to wear these jackets for our trip and the whole neighborhood came out to wishes bon voyage they threw confetti and streamers at us as we got into the car to drive to the airport we weren't just married but we were just contests died back in 1956 there were lots of families with kids like the Nigel's here living in still will drive the dibbles live next door on Coleman Road near Lejeune Cox lived in Wethersfield then in their older daughter Anna was Mary's best friend Dudley and Ruth Birmingham with their sons dick and Allen lived across our backyard mrs. Johnson and a friend represented the older generation in the neighborhood in the family of Dorothy and Jo bounine lived right next door to us what a great send-off they all gave us as we headed up to Radley field as it was 40 years ago we were going to fly first from Hartford to New York and then to California we brought along our scotch-tape mate sign and the pilot and stewardess were greatly interested in are being Disneyland contest winners the children each wore white sailor hats that had Connecticut written on them so people would know where we were from this was the first time they had flown in an airplane so it was very exciting for them in those days they didn't have jet planes propeller-driven Arabs but just being in an airplane like this was a tremendous experience for all of us the pilot flew right over Wethersfield so we could look out the window and try to pick out our own house someplace in the middle down there when we got to New York the plane landed at the old Idlewild International Airport which later became the jf Kennedy we had to change planes here and I must tell you that the such date contest prize was actually only for a family of four and here we were a family of five without any extra funds but since we certainly couldn't leave anyone behind we worked out a deal the company had furnished us with four first-class tickets and we simply exchanged them for five tourist tickets at no extra cost it meant we wouldn't get fancy meals served to us in the luxury rear section of the plane but we were happy just to eat our picnic box lunches in the more crowded forward part of this giant TWA super constellation plane which had a capacity of 64 passengers here we are out on the runway ready to depart for the long nine-hour flight from New York to California this was a difficult shot to take of the plane taking off but I used a telephoto lens as the plane flew over New York City we could look out the window and see down on the right the United Nations building and then over on the left the Empire State Building what a thrill it was to be four miles up in the sky flying high above the clouds we followed our route on a map of the United States so we could tell when we flew over the Mississippi River down there below on our way to a midpoint stop at the striking new st. Louis Missouri Airport here they changed crews and the plane was refueled as we flew on across the country above the Great Plains and then the Rocky and Sierra Mountains we counted a total of 14 States we had flown over by the time we landed in California we had traveled over 3,000 miles in a single day this was the first time that any of us had set foot in California so this was a big moment we were met at the airport by a limousine which drove us to the fabulous Huntington Sheraton Hotel where we were booked to spend the next seven nights we had never stayed in a luxury hotel like this before so we didn't quite know what to expect it turned out that we were the very first of the Disneyland contest families to arrive when we disembarked from the car in our Davy Crockett jackets the hotel manager himself was there to welcome us with a great big basket of fresh California fruit the Huntington Sheraton Hotel has a tremendous expanse of rooms lawns trees and gardens its vine-covered architecture as a reminder of bygone days of more leisurely and gentle upper-class style and elegance the feature we'd like most about it was the large outdoor swimming pool which was open for guests use without additional charge to Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom the climax of our family dream journey this is Disneyland as it was just one year after its official opening we paused to have our pictures taken in front of the flowered face of Mickey Mouse outside the railroad station and then we walked through the tunnel gateway to a world apart the first thing we decided to do was to ride the Skyway to give ourselves a bird's-eye overview of the whole park sitting in a metal cable car moving along from tower to tower we could see the rocket to the moon spaceship in Tomorrowland the kid cars driving around Autopia and the Disneyland train that encircled the park the excitement kept mounting as the cable cars continued high in the air and passed over fantasy land when looked down upon everything from the storybook whale to the tented carousel to the red and white sails of the pirate ship from Peter Pan there were the Mad Hatter teacups Dumbo the flying elephant and Sleeping Beauty's towering castle to say nothing of frontier land and adventure man having enjoyed this sky ride preview now let's go back to the entranceway and follow our dream through this Magic Kingdom step by step to get into the park itself you go through a short tunnel underneath the disneyland in Santa Fe Railroad and then the spell takes place children's faces looking up holding wonder like a cup this is the town square at the head of Main Street USA where all kinds of shops and friendly characters are found like this well-dressed sheriff keeping everyone on good behavior even the street cleaners are in uniform and they keep the place spotless our first stop was at the Disneyland City Hall to check in with our credentials as scotch tape contest winners and to pick up four days worth of free tickets for all the rides when we emerged all of us in our special Davy Crockett jackets what did we find greeting us but the famous dizzy man marching brass band all in red uniforms what our welcome then Mary noticed the Disneyland news on the corner stand and sure enough today's headline read the Barstow family visits Disneyland that was enough to make anyone jump with excitement we decided then that the children needed to have official Disneyland hats to replace their Connecticut sailor hats at least for now Dan and Dave bought space helmets and Mary got a wide brim plastic shade hat our first ride was on the horse-drawn trolley car down Main Street USA reconstructed as it might have been half a century earlier this was remember when time for grownups and why aren't things like this today time for the kids on the right we saw the Main Street cinema starring Rudolph Valentino and Vilma Banky in Valentino's last film the son of the Sheep across the street were the carnation ice cream parlor the Bake Shop the Penny Arcade and the candy palace with all kinds of goodies in every window and storefront at the end of Main Street there's a circular part from which branch out the four different major themed lands this is where we said goodbye to the straw headed horse that had pulled our trolley over on the right we found first of all Tomorrowland with a special clock telling what time it was all around the globe we took a thrilling simulated ride in the rocket ship to the moon and back and remember this was 13 years before humans actually did set foot on the moon also in Tomorrowland were miniature spaceships revolving at various heights and then that drive It Yourself Autopia now to pilot one of these little cars around the course you had to be as tall as the bottom of this sign David made it just by a hair but poor Daniel wasn't high enough so he had to find another activity while David went for a drive this was grown-up fun for an eight-year-old the next land we visited was Fantasyland the entrance to which is through the many turreted Sleeping Beauty Castle across a bridge over a protective moat this fantastic Kingdom has settings and rides from any number of different times and places and stories most of the attractions relate to a familiar Walt Disney movie or cartoon character Danny's favorite was Dumbo the flying elephant he and his mother got into the seat behind the broad-winged light-years of the little elephants and soon they were often flying the world goes round and round when you're up in the sky with an elephant here's how it looked to Danny and Meg as they sailed through the air on Dumbo's big ears whole time another way to go round and round is if one of the Mad Hatter's teacups from Alice in Wonderland by turning the wheel you make the cup world and all you can see is a dizzying ler when you finally do stop spinning around we are back so last time that we did a presentation together Tammy it was about the World's Fair a World's Fairs in general is that right your meat you're so muted by the way it's not my first day on zoom' I promise yes it was it was about what's fair so what do you think about Disneyland as a permanent type of World's Fair wait those are done question I don't know where to start first of all I love this film right the family handing it up at the beginning and uh you know the whole narration right we could come back to that but but yet Disney was built on based on World's Fairs and Expos right which is it which is a legacy of imperialism and you know countries would host fairs and Expos at which they would demonstrate um technological wonders right that spoke to their modernity and progress and at the same time I'm they brought in groups of people and usually from you know two places they were dominating politically and eco economically and setting them up in a traditional village enough for people to look at and so these fairs were we're about you know making visitors feel good about their own country and their own material product project right and so I'm Disney um it has many similarities with with this with the Tomorrowland right is a show of Technology and with them they have adventure land you know where you can go to different environments right that you could you would necessarily be able to travel to in your life and even the American small town and gets presented here right at the 2/3 or 3/4 scale and but if that it's a town that is an idea of what America is like that didn't really exist it's AIT's a town where you have access to all of the consumer pleasures with none of the responsibilities of citizenship right you don't have to deal with anybody that you don't want to deal with you don't have to clean up after yourself right because somebody will come in and sweep it up so um it in many ways it's as much of a fantasy as as any of the you know Tomorrowland or Frontierland you know parts of business and the thing is think this is not the first amusement park there were musical parts you know probably 50 years or even earlier before that and it's interesting in reading about some of what Disney was talking about is he looked to things like Coney Island he looked at amusement parks and he did not want certain aspects of those to be in his part for example he did not want to sell beer he said that that's not what my parks about yes so places like Coney Island Blackpool in England and you know um Atlantic City these these were places that were oftentimes at the beach and industrial workers whose time was was very um managed right um they could um you can get off work and you know head up for a week's vacation and you know companies especially in in England would instruct their employees on how to take a vacation to one of these places because they wouldn't come back in time because they would go and they would drink and you know they would enjoy themselves you know doing something that was Ellen was um could be a pretty well place I'm in New Jersey um you know there were all sorts of amusements and debauchery and you know body humor and you know that would happen at those places and Disney didn't find that that model I was good for American families you know the American nuclear family and you know highly heteronormative um you know highly political charged in a cold war environment right um was supposed to have a place that was um you know supposed to uplift their morals it was supposed to be good clean fun and the only way you do that was by containing it right so so Disney in in Anaheim on you know in Florida writes very contained right to have that barrier between you know the real world and and the world that you know Disney wants us to experience and weep and the fantasy that people want to experience when they go there it's supposed to be a world apart so back to the narration of this film and what resonated with with you about about that about Robins Barstow and his family going to Disneyland so this was the the the voice was recorded in 2002 is that correct right right Ben it's just loosely based on what the script that he had written and had delivered when he started showing the film and it changed over a period of time but I guarantee you the gags are they exactly the same yeah and this is what makes it so endearing right is that it's um it's in the style of a young boy's voice and it's a much older man reading it right and so you can you can see that this was um an activity that he loved to do right that he loved to make films of you part of them and um and then gather people around them right this is one of the the cliches of the 1950s right the come over and see my vacation slides and he came okay say of 1950s suburban culture but you can tell this was a medium that you loved right and so he's he's reading through this script but there's some memory going on and you can tell that he's still in love with that activity and you know the family is is really adorable right you can see why Scotch brand chose this family right there and there's the Davy Crockett jackets and um you know they have fun together and um you know they're gonna represent the Scotch bread really well nice yeah and I had to cut it off but there's a whole thing about how they pack their lunches and there's a whole gag thing about like there's this tiny bag and they just keep pulling food out of it but basically they pack their lunches that's you know they were on a budget there was five of them and you know they were trying to make a week out of visiting California and I also had cut some of that out two of them traveling to other parts of California of Los Angeles and Southern California but yeah this is a family that was on a budget and in he kind of delights and showing us that they were resourceful they were so tell us a little bit about the book that you are that you just published is it is it now available the mass production of memory it is not it it will be available in November and but I started that book actually because I was looking at 1950s vacation films and I wanted to understand those in the context of the Cold War and race relations the American family in in a you know some geopolitical context because people were leaving their homes going to someplace different and what I realized was that I needed to understand an earlier period before I could understand this mid-century period and so I went back to the the first mass-produced portable uh film camera which was the Kodak uh and so it was the Eastman dry plate company that offered that in starting in 1888 and so I wanted to see how they were conceiving of that technology when when photography became more accessible like so people had photographs before but it was a cumbersome and endeavor right and to bring a big camera in the glass plates and all of the developing materials you had to know-how and Eastman made a camera that would allow people to use it it put the images on film and then they could send the film back to the Eastman company that and that would be developed and so then they came up with a brownie around 1900 Y 1903 I think and that made portable mass photography even more affordable for more people and so I compared the ways in which people and understood the activity and associated picture-taking with mobility so I looked at marketing in the from the Eastman company and they had a huge marketing budget they had a sophisticated marketing campaign and you know online with like cosmetics and tobacco they spent that much right and um and then I'd like to add the pictures that people took and I wanted to see do they follow the script that Eastman had did they do something different I tried to read there any other materials that came with their trip to see what kind of experiences they had taking pictures um and I started to really understand how the inequities of of travel and in terms of sexual identity raised ethnicity economic class affected the archive that we have now of travel and so if you had more freedom on the road if you had more money right your photos we're going to look very different right so the people who were wealthier travels travelers tended to follow the script a little more and the people who were less wealthy tended to focus more closely and their family members their community their their own individual experiences rather than trying to frame them you know in the terms of their responsibilities as people with cultural capital right so so so that was a study of an earlier period and I think I think your work skip is inspiring me to take out that initial project that I wanted to take take up and look at the moving in which era nice yeah yeah that's um so here's a one final question and then Jason will magically appear it's actually two questions but it's kind of related all right so when we get through this pandemic do you and your family have a road trip plan somewhere I don't know I don't know where I'm gonna go first you have no idea where you would want to go I hope oi i am i have wanderlust and so and i and i'm finishing a book about travel during this pandemic so um the the train that goes by my house but it's still running and it's still calling me and i wish i could tell you where I'm going to go first um but I can't decide I think I'm gonna have to do some meditating right I just sort through all of the thoughts and all of the places that I've dreamed about you know but right now we as people who are living in a state that is a hotspot right we can't just go anywhere I think the EU is thinking about making us quarantine we have three states now that are asking North Carolinians to quarantine themselves and so right now films like this I think and uh and treble shows um and shows about geography and natural wonders right there and those are are uh are helping me and I think other people right now and when the pandemic first began there was a trend on social media of sharing your old travel photos right uh and and so I think there'll be a lot of pent up demand for right so one one last question and it just popped in my head selfies travel selfies right so in the conclusion of my book I talk about museums concerned with selfies right and obviously there are ways to do a selfie that is is not respectful at the place that you're in right and and and disrespectful photographic behavior goes back to 1888 right so so people not knowing where they're at not knowing that they're guests right it predates the selfie entertain so there's a lot of there's a lot of pearl clutching about the selfie right and there are a lot of places to not take a selfie but at the same time Who am I to tell anybody what they're monic device should be right it shouldn't be up to me right as long as they're being respectful as long as they understand how that behavior affects the environment that they're in right um I just don't see what most of the pearl clutching is about so take selfies everybody can enjoy and put them in an archive so that future historians can have a ball with them well that's what I have I wondered is the fact that people place themselves in these in and what's more important is themselves being in the place and not the place itself so and then to see like Apple introducing features to black out your background is suddenly like oh well it's just about taking pictures of you and not about you at the Smithsonian it's now a picture of you and it's the Griffin impulse I understand right so going back to the Grand Tour of the 18th century you know when Pompeo Buitoni was painting these young men who were travelling about and there were usually from the newly rich class right who were supposed to go out and have their Continental experience they were they were pictured in the environment right in some sort of classical an environment so they could take that portrait back and show that they had been there and then they had some duty according to the culture to instruct people about what they had seen so they were supposed to magnify that experience and that gave them some cultural cash you know um and so to have a photograph of a person in place right even if it's a place than every book tourist you know getting off a plane or a boat has taken right it shows that you were there right so so that gives you that that cultural capital right so I think that impulse goes way back before the selfie there there are so many pictures of people in place taken by a brownie right um I think I have someone the shelf behind me I can pull out and show you I'm so it's an impulse that that goes back you know back to - I guess some the graffiti um in ancient sites and pilgrimage sites you know that says I was here interesting so we're not so we've gone through this before it's not apples fault its or the selfies fault it's who we are as a people and we've been that way for at least 150 years it sounds like Jason you want to pop in I would and I'd like to say a big thank you to dr. Gordon for joining us again tonight to close out our extended series that lasted longer than it typically does for better for better despite the worst that's out there so and so thank you dr. Gordon we're very glad that you decided to join us again it's it's my pleasure thank you very much and then a real heartfelt thanks to skip who does this nearly every day and then still decides to come and partner with NC State libraries every couple of weeks the fest I love it yeah well we're so happy to have you um visit av geeks comm for more info about what AV geeks is check out and you know see what see what's online email them skip will read it probably check out compilations when the library is back open also visit archive.org and youtube.com/ some great websites there and type in AV geeks and see what you find watch other people's home movies and just uh you know enjoy the indoors and pretend you're out of doors in the past through three a/v geeks archive.org and others will be back in the fall we I missed the meeting because a slushie machine broke and that's the real reason I just wanted to get put that note out there I missed the meeting but there were some great topics discussed and we can't wait to to come back in August when school starts in whatever way it starts so thanks everybody thank you skip for doing this thank you guys everybody have a good summer if you liked what I do I'll be doing it Monday one o'clock same bat-time same bat-channel take care everybody have a good weekend [Music] [Music]