I have collected 8mm, Super 8mm and 16mm films since I was in high school. My parents purchased a Kodak M90 movie projector for me for Christmas one year. I also bought a couple silent 8mm films, a Three Stooges and 50-foot version of a horror movie. Christmas Eve 1971 we watched "Ants in the Pantry" on the living room wall.

It wasn't long after that I became acquainted with Blackhawk Films by renting Laurel and Hardy, Chaplin and D.W. Griffith films at the library. Many of them were in poor condition and the many burns and splices damaged my projector on a couple occasions. So I began to slowly assemble my collection one film at a time from earnings at Conley's, a small department store now out of business. I awaited the arrival of my Blackhawk catalog every month to see what title was on sale.

My prize possession was a Eumig super 8mm sound projector purchased after I got out of high school. When I started showing sound films, I thought I had finally arrived. But the price of those things -- wow! It took a long time to assemble a collection. My first feature was "Way Out West." On one of our first dates, I showed it to the woman who would become my wife. Her father had a donut shop and we set up the projector in the work room after they'd gone to bed for the night. I still think of those nights in the donut shop and sitting on that wood floor around the projector, keeping the volume down so we wouldn't wake her father, who passed away Sept. 22, 2003. He turned out to be an old movie fan, and often came to our outdoor movie events at our house.

I also purchased films from Thunderbird, which had some pretty terrible sound prints but some unusual silent material. I continued to collect after we got married (November 16, 1974), and we bought a small cottage on Lake Erie. One of the nice features of this cottage was a large picture window in the front. It had a window shade that doubled as a 6-foot movie screen.

We bought a second house in 1977 and there was less and less money for films. Then my son came along, and I got out of film collecting. I hung onto the films, hoping he would find them entertaining. He did when he was small, and his favorite was a 200-foot version of The Wizard of Oz. Then came 1984, and I lost my job at the bank and things got tight. So I sold all but 10 or so of my silents. A few years later, with no one in the family having any interest in the films and video coming on strong, I sold my sound films.

Revisiting my past

Then in 1991 I realized how much I missed my films and began the long, tedious, expensive process of rebuilding a collection. I subscribed to the Big Reel and had both good and bad experiences purchasing films from other collectors and dealers. I found a couple libraries that were discarding their collections and was able to acquire many Blackhawks in both 16mm and 8mm. But they are not the pristine prints I once had in my collection.

Today, I collect Blackhawk shorts in both 8mm and 16mm gauges. I'm not real big on television shows because of the high price, but I do like the Beverly Hillbillies and Jack Benny. I have about 500 films in my collection at this time, including every sound short by Laurel and Hardy and most all of the Our Gang sound shorts. I am always interested in buying films, one or an entire collection, especially libraries.

I consider myself very blessed to have these films and watching them is my main form of recreation. I watch very little television. I enjoy the big image and the quality and content of pre-1950 films. And I love to share them with other people, which leads us to the subject of the Pine Ridge Planetarium.