Skip and Marsha report on HMD Raleigh:
Wow! We more than doubled our attendance this year. Thankfully we had many more volunteers and projectors – so things didn’t get too hectic. Thanks to everybody who organized and volunteered for the event: Marsha Orgeron, Devin Orgeron, Germaine Fodor, Tom Whiteside, Dave Zahn, Ty Beddingfield, Jim Haverkamp, Charlotte Walton, Kate Kluttz, Rich Schemitsch, Jessye McDowell and Anna Bigelow.
We had mostly super 8 and 8mm with a little more super 8 this year. There was some more lenticular color footage on 16mm from one of our volunteer’s grandmother’s collection.
Here’s co-organizer Marsha Orgeron’s writeup of the event:
It was really a fantastic day and a very successful event. About 75 people came through Caldwell G107 many of them staying all day to see what people brought. We had a dozen volunteers working the event, mostly from the local arts community (plus Anna Bigelow from Religious Studies).
About 10 minutes before start time, NBC and News 14 showed up and I did interviews with them; their cameramen also stayed to shoot the first part of the event. The News 14 report is airing hourly today; I haven’t seen the NBC report, which probably aired while we were at the event. A reporter from Our State Magazine also attended HMD; he is writing a feature story that will appear the month of next year’s event.
Although most people who came to the event were from Raleigh, we also had people come from Tarboro, Fuquay Varina, Durham, and Garner. Some of the highlights included a man who brought several reels of gorgeous color 8mm film he shot of his fraternity in the 1950s, with some great party footage (the man explained the ritual of pinning to the audience, saying that it wasn’t what we all might be thinking!); a couple who brought their early 1970s super8 wedding footage from New York that they had never seen before; some 1920s footage of motorcycle racing (including clowns and stunts with no helmets!) on a dirt track and some very primitive and scary version of a demolition derby; and some great color footage of a young girl’s red sequined dance pageant at a Sanford elementary school.
We repeatedly heard how grateful people were to have an event like this, to get to relive their old memories and learn how to take care of them.
[Pre-event media coverage online: News 14]