FDR_inaug.jpg
A still image from video shot at Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1941 inauguration.
(Courtesy photo)
For one Ann Arbor family, cleaning out the closet led to the discovery of a unique piece of American history.
Bill Robertson and his wife recently decided on a whim to convert a batch of old family videos in order to digitally store them.
“What I do typically with clients is I say ‘let me show you what the process looks like, let me show you a film as it’s being converted,’” Priceless Photo Preservation owner Rob Hoffman said.
“I took out one of the reels that said 1941 and the very first moment it looks like a Washington, DC parade and I’ll be damned, but that looks like FDR and Eleanor in the car.”
The 3-inch reel had about four minutes of footage on it and the first minute and 25 seconds captured what is believed to be Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inaugural parade in January 1941.
“It’s a really cool film,” Hoffman said.
“It came into a box of mysterious films that a local family said they wanted to have converted because grandma and grandpa were in town and they thought it would be a fun thing to have it.”
Bill Robertson said he knew that his grandparents traveled a lot, but he had no idea what would be on the film reels, many of which were only marked with the years they were shot.
“These films have just been sitting in my parents' closet for years,” Robertson, who lives in Ann Arbor, said.
“We happened to think it’d be interesting to convert them. We expected it to just be our grandparents when they were younger.”
In addition to the footage from the inaugural parade, Robertson’s maternal grandfather had also taken video when he went on trips to Cuba and Disneyland in its first years. One video shows U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren leading the Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena, California.
“I was telling Bill that his grandfather who shot the films is quite a remarkable cameraman,” Hoffman said.
“Not only did he have a good camera but he had a good eye for shooting important things. There’s nothing wasted on any of these films.”
Hoffman said that he has developed other color home video from the 1940s, when the technology was just starting to emerge as a viable option for middle class families.
“It was expensive back then, but people really wanted to invest in it,” Hoffman said.
“It wasn’t common, but it also wasn’t uncommon for people who really wanted to preserve these types of memories. It becomes more widespread in the 1950s.”
Interest in the Roosevelts is high after the recent PBS documentary on the family directed by Ken Burns. The newly discovered footage caught the eye of senior Roosevelt historians after it was posted online and Hoffman says he believe it might be better preserved than much of the other available footage of the inauguration.
“This whole thing has gotten very interesting very quickly,” Robertson said.
“We put these on tape just so my parents could watch them. Rob noticed the FDR clip, he asked me if he could put it on his blog, and then the FDR Presidential Library saw it and contacted him.”
Robertson plans to turn the original reels over to the library after receiving permission from his parents who he says are major “history buffs.”
“It shows how small the world is that you can take a little family film like this and have it developed and then people see it all over the world,” he said.
See the full video:
Ben Freed is a general assignments reporter for The Ann Arbor News. Email him at benfreed@mlive.com and follow him on twitter at @BFreedinA2. He also answers the phone at 734-623-2528.