My next-door neighbor Steve recently gave me a wonderful present: a handful of aluminum and a little bit of glass. I am now the second owner of a 1945 Bell and Howell 8mm, hand-wind movie camera. It has a Taylor Hobson lens and a mechanical computer on the side so I always have the right exposure for the lens. It is the same make and model camera that I bought the day I got out of the Navy in 1946. I spent $94.95 for that original camera.
The camera is only two inches thick and five inches long, and it fits in the palm of my hand. It was with me all day until I was loaned a 16mm Bell and Howell camera to replace it and start my movie business in 1949.
When I first held the 8mm camera Steve gave me the other night a thousand memories came flooding back.
The first one was looking at a cold winter sky with Orion very prominent as I lay by the open door of our teardrop trailer. It was the same temperature inside the trailer as it was outside and that night it was very cold in the Sun Valley parking lot. Ward Baker and I were warm in our down-filled war surplus mummy bags.
We would eventually spend the winter living there. It was sometimes hard to fall asleep because we were so excited about learning to be better skiers.
I took 8mm movies of the dirt streets in Aspen. Also, I filmed scenes of the Alta parking lot with our Buick and trailer buried under two feet of snow and of skiing down The Big Hill at Badger Pass in Yosemite when there was one rope tow and a sled lift.
Each time I pick up that 8mm camera a new memory falls out of it.
Some of those 8mm movies are still in my basement. Some of them I loaned to Kim Schneider when we were both helping to create my annual feature length film. Unfortunately, many of those 8mm films are buried somewhere in a warehouse stack of hundreds of other movies in Boulder, Colo.
Ward Baker also had an 8mm movie camera so we tried to improve our skiing style by reading books by Otto Lang. We would take movies of each other to see what we were doing wrong. We took movies of each other carving a nice set of figure eights on Horse Ridge next to Ostrander Lake in Yosemite.
Six weeks after I bought my 8mm camera I bought a three-inch telephoto and a tripod and began making surfing movies at Malibu in August of 1946. Unfortunately all of the surfing films I had taken disappeared about 30 years ago, but the memories are still vivid for me now that I have that 8mm camera in my hand.
That 8mm camera almost completes the collection of stuff that will be on exhibit at the Warren Miller Center for the Performing Arts in Big Sky, Mont. that is scheduled to open in December.
It was a real hoot for me to have this much fun just because I bought an 8mm movie camera and earn enough money taking movies to put three kids through college.
I look at what became a memory bank that Steve found for me in that small 8mm camera with a historical metal computer on the side of it. It is here on my desk alongside my laptop computer and the notes that I am stitching together as I write my biography.
I only have the last 10 years or so to still write about. Then it is a re-edit, sort out thousands or more historical photographs, hundreds of cartoons and then the company will find a publisher. Until then I will gather a lot more pleasant memories from this gift from Steve, my next-door neighbor.