Ann Arbor 200 is not the public library's first foray into celebrating a milestone in our community's history by creating resources about it. For Ann Arbor's sesquicentennial back in 1974, the Ann Arbor Public Library produced a series of videos for television called I Remember When. This series, produced by Catherine Anderson and hosted by Ted Trost, assembled newly-collected interviews with prominent Ann Arborites into episodes about various topics in history like city politics or the Greek and German communities. The Ann Arbor District Library digitized all seven episodes of I Remember When from VHS tapes back in 2014 and made them available online. It has since become beloved not just for its interviews with local people we can otherwise only read about but also for its delightfully goofy 1970s-ness. It turned out there was more yet to come.
About five years ago, a box was unearthed from a back corner of the basement of the Downtown Library that contained a set of old videotapes in a format with which no one was familiar. AADL Archives staff took a closer look and realized that what had been found were the original interviews performed to create those episodes of I Remember When. These were on a long-obsolete format of magnetic tape called EIAJ-1, briefly used by the television media in the early 1970s. Having sat neglected for nearly 50 years, we had little hope we would get much out of them. They were shipped to a specialist digitization company in Pennsylvania who knew how to extract the audio and video from these tapes (not as simple as just having a player; these tapes need to be baked in an oven before they can even be played).
As it happened, almost all of the contents were salvageable, and those contents were more than we could have hoped for. Interviews with over 30 prominent Ann Arborites of the twentieth-century, each between 20 and 60 minutes long. We had of course seen bits of these, but at most there might be six minutes in an episode from any given interview, so there was a great deal of material we had not seen before. In addition, an eighth episode of I Remember When was discovered; whether this episode was never aired or just never transferred onto the VHS tapes we originally digitized we do not know.
This lost episode, School Days, featuring segments with Lela Duff, Linda Eberbach, David Inglis, Bill Bishop, and Ashley Clague, is now available on aadl.org.
The complete set of interviews is also available below, offering a wealth of archival material from Ann Arbor's past. These have been fully transcribed and indexed by AADL Archives staff. Enjoy hearing voices and seeing faces from Ann Arbor's past, but take note before you do: the sensibilities of 50 years ago are not the sensibilities of today, and some of the things you hear may be surprising coming from these storied citizens. But the heroes of Ann Arbor history were people, and people of their times, and that knowledge alone is worth the unearthing.
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AAHS Class of 1924 50th Reunion - Linda Eberbach, David Inglis, Bill Bishop |
1974 Gemutlichkeit German Festival - Albert Duckek, George Sauter, Hans Rauer |
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