Center for Home Movies

Gates of Graceland, Rodney K. Ketcham Collection

The Gates at Graceland, Memphis, 1958

79 reels 16mm (app. 29,550 ft.), 29 reels 8mm (app. 6,440 ft.)

The large collection of 8mm and 16mm amateur films by Rodney Kenneth Ketcham is familial, yet international, in scope, showing both travel throughout the United States and abroad and domestic home movie scenes. Content notes are from Dr. Ketcham’s daughter Jerri Ketcham McDermott.

Dr. Rodney Kenneth Ketcham (1909-2002), grew up in Lestershire, New York. Dr. Ketcham was a Cornell graduate (B.A. 1929, M.A. 1930, Ph.D. 1938), teaching high school in Windsor, NY, and serving as a reader and assistant at Cornell to pay his way through graduate school. He found a position teaching Romance Languages at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, in 1938. During World War II the Army instead assigned him to teach math at Geneva to newly incoming GIs. After the war, he returned home to become a founding faculty member at Triple Cities College (TCC) in Endicott. In the 1950s, TCC joined the State University of New York system as Harpur College (now Binghamton University), and later moved to a new campus across the Susquehanna River in Vestal, NY. Dr. Ketcham became full professor, teaching French, Spanish, and German, and also served as chairman of the Foreign Languages Department, first at Geneva, then at Harpur College, and later at SUNY Cortland. Dr. Ketcham’s expertise in many languages and his love of nature, culture, and foreign climes led to his being a lifetime world traveler and photographer. Dr. Ketcham used his pictures of foreign landscapes, cityscapes, and, in particular, signs, to enrich his classes, giving both a language lesson and the flavor of the countryside to students who had never traveled abroad. He was also a popular presenter at local schools, clubs, and travel groups.

The majority of the collection has been transferred to video and is available for viewing on Archive.org