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REEL LEGACY
APRIL 19, 1996
TRANSCRIPT
Fifteen reels of 8 mm film help essayist Jim Fisher of the Kansas City Star take a look back at the golden age of heartland America.
JIM FISHER: Hartville, Missouri, 60 miles East of Springfield in the Ozark foothills--old brick buildings, two state roads, and few people on the streets. Pretty ordinary. One might think Hartville has always looked like this. Well, you know it has. How do we know? There are pictures.
Remember? Suits and ties to come to town. Old bib overalls and fedoras or straw hats, depending on the season for the farmer, not an implement cap in sight. Saddle shoes, long skirts, sweaters, scarves for the girls, dresses and hats for women, wind breakers and high combed hair for the teenage boys. The older women wore print dresses and tinned hair.
It was a time when people gathered downtown. Old men sat on the sunlit benches. Cars were mostly black, and coming to town on a horse-drawn cart was no big deal. (music in background)
We know about Hartville because Tommy Farmer was the druggist who from the late 1930's to the early 1950's stepped outside his store and recorded the passing scenes with his eight millimeter camera.
People knew Tommy. The kids occasionally mugged; some acted shy. Most just looked at the camera and smiled natural enough, since Tommy was one of them. After Tommy died in a car accident on his 84th birthday, he'd been over to a nearby town visiting a lady friend, there was a big estate sale. Fifteen reels of the film showed up in an old box. Restored and edited for continuity, the images are now on video. (music in background)
Tommy was no pro. Occasionally he was out of focus, but in taking his pictures, he recorded what a good part of this country looked like only an eye blink ago. Tommy unwittingly filmed something else, community, people being involved not just with their own kind but with others. Take the easy farmer conversations, farmer to town folk, politics, crops, how the St. Louis cardinals were doing. Surely those subjects came up, though we'll never know. Tommy's footage was silent. But people talked; they listened. In Tommy's film, there's none of that current staple of life, confrontation, but it was more than talk. It was running foot races up Rolla Street, the girls, the boys, and of course, the adults too, laughing at themselves, but trying. What better way to teach than to do?
Of course, a lot has changed. There's a new courthouse in Hartville. Route 38 has been repaved. Here and there are deserted storefronts, unimaginable in small town America 50 years ago, yet now a testament to discounters in nearby, bigger towns.
Yet one scene in Tommy's films is indelible, boxing in the town square. Two teenagers with padded gloves, hitting as good as they got. Why? Again, we'll never known. But look behind the flailing, at the watching men folk, their faces as intent as any gathering of tribal elders halfway around the world. Maybe that's Tommy Farmer's real legacy: the chronicling of a time when we were still a tribe, one loosely called Americans, bound by our sameness, not split by our differences.
Two kids boxing in a small town square--corny? Perhaps. But somehow it beats guns and drive-by shootings, or death at an early age for an imagined slight and a pair of Reeboks.
None of the people Tommy took pictures of could have imagined such a thing then--not in Hartville. No way.
I'm Jim Fisher.
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