A Visit To The Alton Museum Of History & Art ca. 1985

As VideoBgood, decades ago, I posted my very first video project, recorded while I was studying Video Production at UMSL in the mid-1980's. That project was the John Hartford, Julia Belle Swain music videos that I'm still very pleased about. This project for the Alton Museum arose from my having done "old time photography with costumes" at the Museum for their Open House one year. I purchased a great antique view camera for that and made a homemade polaroid back for it from a thrift store Land Camera. For their outreach program (providing Museum content to schools, hospitals and retirement communities) I rented what was a standard ENG recorder/camera rig from Schillers. 3/4" Umatic. I had purchased a fluid head tripod after the frustrations of trying to pan the movements of the Julia Belle Swain. But, wireless mics were not available to mere mortals. The lavalier wired mic we used was not balanced and gave us a maddening ground hum. So, the audio is rather horrible on this narrative story telling. There was a lot to learn from this piece which was pretty well-received by the community. There was no internet, no cell phones, no America's Funniest Home Videos, and no common knowledge about remote video recording. So, all things considered.. not bad. A decade later, for our Series on Classic Boating, we had ironed out most of these technical limitations (with the giant exception of a $5000 steady-cam rig).
This transcription is from the only copy I know of. It's lousy because it's at least 3rd generation VHS dupe. Also, please keep in mind that the video standard in those days compared to today was like a postage stamp placed on an 8 1/2"x14" legal size paper. In those days, before the internet, the government was openly paranoid about media messaging. If I recall, the FCC required anyone using a text generator (chyron) to qualify for a license costing $100,000. I'm pretty sure I was one of the DIY video guys who figured a way around this by using an Atari 800 XL as a character generator for the title plate of this video. Back in the 70's, I made the first music video in St. Louis with one of the six Betamax home recorder test units in the U.S. "Rondo's Blues Deluxe at Mississippi Nights." Later, curiously, I had a job trying to sell commodore Amiga computers to the increasing number of people wanting to do, "Desktop Video." We could still only output composite VGA quality but the broadcast engineers got really scared of the writing on the wall and had me fired for infringing on their broadcast quality equipment sales. (I kinda showed them up at the convention). Ironically, Commodore could never outgrow it's game machine reputation and failed big time at trying to be like IBM. I owned one of the first TARGA boards that theoretically could input graphics to an X86 IBM style PC. It did work after a tormenting process. But, with no video compression codecs and floppy disc storage, we were limited to minutes of video in postage stamp sizes. Over the decades I've invested in the state of art equipment for semi-pro video equipment. Today, most of that is superseded by your phone.
The reason I'm posting this is: there's interesting history to learn in the piece from wonderful elders. People like these presenters were special back then, and very, very rare today. This is also a legacy video for those fine individuals.