1971 Pacific Palisades ARC
Field
Day Movie
The 1971 film — Field Day 1971
— from the long gone Palisades ARC has to be ham radio's comedy
classic. I moved to Los Angeles in 1972 and was invited to a PARC
meeting by the late Fred Deeg, N6FD (the former K6AEH), whom I had met
when he was on a business trip to NYC back in the late 1960's and
showed up on the old WA2SUR repeater from in da Big Apple. Fred was was
the then US rep for Standard Radio. He and I became friends. When
Sharon and I moved West, Fred was one of those who introduced me to ham
radio life on 2 meters in L.A.
A
few months later -- in May of 1973, the club ran the film in
preparation for Field Day. It was the first time I saw it and it was
instant LMAO when compared to all of the stodgy Field Day operations I has attended back on the East coast. At that time I was writing for 73 Magazine
and did a review of the movie -- not knowing that there was but one
film print in existence: The one shown each year at a PARC May meeting.
Soon
the club began getting requests to borrow the film, but the group was
reticent to lend out the original edited master. So, the club had a
duplicate print struck by Technicolor Corp. in Burbank. It then started
mailing it, along with a cassette of the audio and instructions on how
to keep the sound in sync with the picture, to radio clubs all over
North America. In 1976, when Super 8mm sound film was introduced,
another copy of the original was struck onto stock where the sound
track could be added to the mag stripe on the film. I actually did that
transfer using a borrowed Sears/GAF sound on film recording projector
and a Norelco Carry-Corder 150 cassette player.
For the last
several years of the PARC club, that was the film print we ran at the
May meeting -- the original hand edited version having been retired to
storage by the late George Hively, K6YEA/W6GRH, who had put it
together. I have that sound print and it is still project-able. In
fact, when I do showings, its usually from that print using an Eastman
M-67 projector. (Note to any of you home movie buffs: Eastman M-67 and
68 series projectors are the gentlesist on old film of any machines and
can usually be bought for $20 or so on eBay.)
The version
included on Gary's new DVD is a re-edit done by Dub Egbert, W0MMM, from
George Hively's original hand edited master. In digitizing it, Dub
changed it a bit by using music from parts of the film to cover silent
periods that when running the film with a separate tape for sound were
used to re-sync the sound to the picture by either speeding up or
slowing down the projector. It took a bit of skill to run the film and
keep the sound and picture in reasonable sync. Dub solved that by
transferring the film to a video file and grabbing the music score from
various spots and using it to cover the silent times. Because of this
some music placement in the film version is a bit different than the
electronic version -- but now the sound is always in sync with the
picture.
Dub also added credits telling who appeared in the
show. Sadly, most of those folks are now SK. But I knew most of them
and kind of look at PARC Field Day 1971
as the clubs filmed legacy to ham radio. As such, I am very happy that
Gary chose to include this bit of "comic ham radio film history" along
with his new show on The Last BIG Field Day.
Or, as the late entertainer Peter Allen wrote: "Don't throw the past
away. You might need it some rainy day. Dreams do come true again, when
everything old is new again." -- de WA6ITF
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