[Home Movie: William Schmidt Collection, 1949, shot of Bill Schmidt]

About

Synopsis

Single shot of Bill Schmidt

Collection Description

This film (Schmidt_0004) is part of the Bill Lewis & Schmidt Family collection.

This collection encompasses the personal and professional life of “Bill Lewis” and the Schmidt family. It is the family joke that Schmidts are collectors and savers--but not the most apt organizers or record keepers. The family has always been vaguely aware their old family film reels, most often captured by Bill, existed in a box “somewhere.” When the family matriarch, Margaret “Proxie” made the decision to downsize from her condo, her and Bill’s children--James “Jim”, Karen, and Karla-- and eldest granddaughter, Kayla Schmidt, gathered to help clear out her storage. Bill was a diligent photographer and videographer. His work on the radio as “Bill Lewis” allowed him to capture sound as well. Proxie’s family had been in the Minot, North Dakota area for several generations. Photo albums were located with pictures dating back a century. The reels discovered in her basement aren't as clear as to what they contain.

Proxie is in her 90s and Bill would have turned 100 this year. Proxie is as sharp as ever, but sentimentality was never her style, thus, the items in this collection are all “best guesses.” The film reels most likely contain footage of their family in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Proxie and her mother, Ida Rudbeck, both worked as telephone operators and lived in downtown Minot. Ida, Proxie, and Bill lived together in a house on Minot’s Beacon Street which overlooked the building of the Town & Country Shopping Mall, which was considered the state’s biggest mall at the time ( late 1960s). Bill and Proxie later built their family home on a hill overlooking the whole of the “Magic City.” Their children recall Bill being a big ham for the camera, so while the footage hopefully contains imagery of a midwestern city in midcentury America, we also suspect a few hijinks.

Other items are believed to be radio recordings (commercials, news segments, interviews) from Bill’s work as a broadcaster. One tape is labeled “Bill Lewis 1949” which coincides with Bill’s taking on his radio moniker and moving to Minot from St. Paul, Minnesota to work for the station KLPM. Other tapes contain mentions of either KLPM or KKOA, the two stations he worked for. Other items include cassette tapes that also most likely contain his work for the radio, one that contains the recording of his final broadcast in 1981, and the recording of Bill’s funeral service in 1991. While audio recordings aren’t as striking as historical footage, Bill’s voice was highly recognizable in Minot during his decades on the radio, and the Schmidt family hopes to preserve his voice and his work. The nature of news broadcasting, the role of radio stations, and the concept of a “local personality” have significantly shifted in a digital, global world. These recordings--whatever may have been captured and has survived multiple moves and damp basements--have the potential to showcase a distinct snapshot of a community, a family, and one man’s work from a very different moment in time.

This collection was conserved and digitally captured through the 2023 Al Larvick Regional Grant awarded to Kayla Schmidt by the Al Larvick Conservation Fund in partnership with its lab partner The MediaPreserve.

For more information about this collection, visit: https://www.allarvickfund.org/bill-lewis-schmidt-family-collection

The mission of the Al Larvick Conservation Fund is to preserve historical and cultural heritage through conservation, education, and the public accessibility of American analog home movie, amateur cinema, and community recording collections. For more information, visit allarvickfund.org.

*Please respect the Creative Commons licensing assigned to this collection.

Specifications

Human-made No record of this work says a model made it. What this means.

Archive

Internet Archive, in Home movies

Licence or status

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, as the Internet Archive states it.

Credit

William Louis "Bill" Schmidt

Who can watch

The archive gives no rating. Invisible Network shows it to Tweens profiles and older, judged from its collection and subjects. How films are placed