Rush Boys 1957 – 1967

I was digging through some of my old VCRs and found one I forgot that I had.  It was entitled Rush Boys 1957 – 1967.  It will most likely be of interests only to me and my brothers… and possibly their families.  But what the heck, I can post it for free on YouTube and link to it from here… so why not.

My father had a home movie camera that I really do not remember him pulling it out all that often. To be honest the quality on this video is very poor and the videography leaves a lot to be desired. The really bad videography is a bit surprising as my father was a very technical person and an early adapter of technology. From everything I have ever heard he was an absolute whiz kid when it came to the mechanical side of helicopters.  I imagine if my father had not grown up so poor, in a family where education was not particularly pushed, he would have made a crackerjack engineer.  Alas, that was not his path in life.  However, thanks to the training he received in the Navy he had a good career as a technical representative for Kaman Aerospace that took him to many places around the globe. As a more senior employee later on, he was able to haul the family along with him.

While it is labeled Rush Boys 1957 – 1967 there are other things on there as well.

The VCR appears to have been spliced together from several different times. Occasionally it looked like it was out of chronological order.  In the video there are scenes that looked overexposed, but they are going from one splice to another.   I spent some of my time watching trying to figure where we were, and who was who.

Highlights

• • My father, almost every time he filmed my mother, would pan from her face all the way down to her feet and then all the way back up to her face… hubba hubba!
  • Starts in Majove, California close to a Marine base
  • Scenes from when we lived in Fredericksburg, VA
  • Various times in Checotah, OK and Owensboro, KY as we were going from one side of the country to the other, and from when we returned from Italy
  • There are a few brief scenes of the Dodd girls when they were young
  • Brief scenes of my mother’s parents and my father’s parents.
  • For some reason no scenes from our time in Maryland, New Jersey, Rhode Island, etc
  • Picks up in Italy with quite a bit of footage (bad) from there
  • Jeffrey in his Italian kindergarten smock and shaved head is “precious”
  • Footage of 13 year old me in a cast, but with shirt open and  my six-pack on display. I played a lot sports back then.  In fact, I broke my arm playing baseball.
  • Footage of one of us in Italy, I believe it to be 9 year old Mike but he is not sure, swilling a Peroni beer while my father filmed the action, around minute 21
  • Brief footage of our Italian maid, Susie, who was really like another family member
  • Footage of all five of us boys, in ties and jackets (yeah that is how folks traveled back then on planes), waiting for the flight back to the USA…I was hiding behind a book.
  • Footage from their time in Tehran, Iran. Paul and I were out of the house by then. All of the footage is of Jeff and Mark although Mike was there too.

And so it went back in the day

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