Dad's Home Movies

 

My dad passed away twenty two years ago. I miss him, but at least he left us with his home movies. Dad bought an 8mm movie camera in 1965, just in time for Christmas. Over the years, until VHS video came into being, Dad took lots of movies. I have been converting those old movies to MP4 files with a machine I bought a few months ago. One thing that has become apparent is that Dad was a crappy cameraman. His style was very shaky, and blurry, and in many cases the people had the top of their heads cut off. So it's not high quality video, but oh the memories those crappy movies are bringing back. What I've found interesting are the movies of my younger brothers and sisters that Dad took after I moved out of the house. I was nineteen when my youngest sister was one year old. In 1971 Mom and Dad took those five or six younger kids on a vacation to Tennessee, while I was living on a hippie commune in Iowa. That's the part I find so interesting, what they were all doing while I was stoned and living my life elsewhere. I'm starting to believe that Mom and Dad had eleven children because as long as there was a baby in the house, they felt young. Also, the odds increase that at least one of them won't be a stoned hippie.