title: Barrington - Story

In early January of 2015 my paternal grandmother, Susan Barnett, passed away at the age of 74. She was a very large part of my life - a mother figure and close friend that felt to me as permanent and essential to the Earth as any rock or stream ever was. To this day I miss her very dearly.

In the weeks following her passing my dad had begun the arduous journey of settling her estate. I had been tasked with helping to clean out her shed - an old wooden thing built by my step-grandfather in a heroic age before I was born. This consisted mostly of sifting through fishing rods, denatured lawn-care products, and other such refuse left inside the shed in the wake of his passing some eighteen years prior. However, in the rafters tucked amongst Christmas decor and rusting Folgers cans was a nondescript box containing 33 reels of film. Among these: 22 400-foot reels and 11 50-foot reels.

Most of the films were in incredibly rough shape, but none so faded as to be wholly unwatchable, and each preserved a slice of life from my grandmother's childhood in 1940's Barrington, Illinois.

Susan Rae Brandt

At 4 PM on September 6th of 1940 my grandmother was born in her family home at 616 Sycamore Ave in Barrington, Illinois. She was born as Susan Rae Brandt, the youngest child of Illinois dairy magnate Raymond Brandt, following her elder sister Annette and brother Glenn.

Mr. Brandt, along with his two brothers, ran the Brandt Dairy Company: an agricultural enterprise operating out of Barrington, Illinois that dabbled in a great deal of things, but most notably operated its titular dairy delivery services with a fleet of iconic cream-white trucks.

My grandmother spoke very fondly of her years growing up on the farm. She also spoke very fondly of countless family vacations, particularly to the American Southwest and Florida. I really wish I remembered more of the details of those stories or asked her more questions, but unfortunately I don’t and I didn’t.

By adolescence Susan had lost both of her parents in unrelated car accidents and had moved to live with her aunt and uncle the Vehe’s. After graduating, marrying, anulling, and remarrying, she followed my grandfather Robert Goldeck to an army base in Germany. They later settled in New Jersey, and beyond the occasional letter or family gathering, gradually fell out of contact with the extended Brandt family back in Barrington.

A Film Collection

I honestly don't know how my grandmother came into possession of the film - I assume it must have been given to her upon her parent’s death. I'm not even sure who filmed it.

My dad vaguely recalls my grandfather renting a projector for the family to watch some of them sometime in the early ‘70’s. Shortly thereafter, the collection would have been one of the few family heirlooms pulled from the ruins of their home after it burned down. As far as I know, next to none of the film has been watched since.

I can reasonably say that this film is probably the only copy in existence. I have no reason to believe any duplicates were ever made or scans produced. I don’t know if there’s more, or if other people are looking for it - but it’s here now and I’ve always felt my family should do something to preserve it.

Doing Something

For years the immense cost of professional archival meant that it would remain sitting in its box, only this time in my basement instead of my grandmother’s shed. So aged and delicate was the film that I was scared to even watch it. On the few occasions I built up the courage to feed it through our late model Bell & Howell, I ended up melting, tearing, or otherwise eviscerating precious milliseconds of history.

I couldn’t ever shake the feeling that the stories the film held, my family's stories, were literally rotting away, but without a huge chunk of money to chuck at the problem the collection just sat.

Older and now with slightly more money than my nineteen year old self, I would endeavor to save the collection. I attempted to get it professionally archived, but quotes I received were in the ballpark of 'new compact SUV', so I chickened out.

While there definitely wasn’t enough money to get it archived, I'd emotionally invested myself too deep and needed to see it through. Maybe I could at least find a way to save what I could?

So I set out to digitally preserve this film by converting a 1940’s movie projector into an automated digital scanner, and try to share with others who may be interested in the stories it has to tell.

You can read about the [technical details]({% post_url 2020-05-09-barrington-technical %}) of my efforts.

50-foot Reels

As of writing, I’ve scanned all but a few tricky examples of the 50-foot reels.

These are very small and quick to scan, usually lasting about two and a half minutes and featuring some event or family vacation, which is usually Arizona. I don't really have a lot of context as to who is in them or what they're about, but they're fun to watch.

I've included a few below, but a lot more will be shared as they're scanned. I'm very much going in blind before I scan these, so it's always a pleasant surprise every time I scan a film that isn't Arizona.

This one seems to be in the Phoenix area.

There’s a cool motel and an airport, which definitely seems to be Phoenix’s Sky Harbor.

My grandmother shows up every now and then with her bright blond hair and orange pants. Given her age, this probably dates to the mid '40s.

I think this one might be somewhere near the Mexican border in the mid to late '40s. It's mostly scenery but still cool.

This one's rough but probably very special to someone. It seems to depict somebody's wedding, and it definitely isn't my grandmother's. I'm not good with faces so I can't really spot anybody. Pretty cool though.

400-foot Reels

The 400-footers are quite literally where the bulk of the good stuff is. Most of them are at least 12 minutes in length and vary in content. However, being eight times longer than their fifty foot counterparts, they continue to provide eight times as many new and ever more annoying problems.

This is the first big reel of film I managed to cleanly scan. It isn't great at times, but the content is breathtaking.

It's very clearly footage of my grandmother as a toddler sometime in '41 or '42. It actually seems to be a combination of a couple different reels that have been taped together with scotch tape, as it jumps from black and white to color and across time and space from Christmas to Easter and Thanksgiving. It all mostly seems to take place at their home in Deer Park.

The two other kids she's often with are definitely her sister Annette and her brother Glenn. I can't really speak with great authority as to who anybody else is.

This reel alone honestly makes the entire project worthwhile. Days after seeing this for the first time I still can't help but smile at the pure magic of it. Everything is so surreal and removed from my experience - the clothes, the scenery, the colors, the manic whimsy of the cinematography - but it's all undeniably human and rooted.

Closing Remarks

I’m going to continue to post scans as they're produced to this YouTube playlist if for some reason you're interested in more historical footage of Arizona.

I never had the opportunity to watch these films with my grandmother, and as most of the handwritten labels on the reels have long since faded away, I have very little context as to who is in them or where and when they were filmed.

If you know more about the Brandt's and their story, potentially are one, know where I could learn more, or otherwise just want to say hi - I'd love to hear from you! My email is mattgoldeck@gmail.com.