Everett Taylor: Taylor's Yarns

Today's younger generation has been photographed in just about every stage of their daily living.

Every time they look up - and a lot of times when they are not looking - some type of camera is recording what they do and how they react. The term "camera shy" went out with the old Kodak box camera.

Perhaps nothing has been impacted more by the new technology rush than picture-taking.

Not just youngsters, but people of all ages likely have their images recorded in some manner almost every day.

Cameras take just about all shapes and forms and there is almost instant recall in many cases with the image available for viewing in seconds on the same instrument with which the picture was taken. No more waiting for days or weeks for the roll of film to go through the mail to San Antonio, or some such place, and back, as was standard some 60 or so years ago.

Even some of those hand-held cell phones now also do double- or triple-duty for multiple uses, including as a camera. And people come under camera surveillance at a lot of places they might go. At almost any time, anyone can be on candid camera.

Turn the calendar back a half century or more to a time when television was in its infancy and picture-taking still was quite primitive compared to today.

Motion pictures were in their heyday, but they were "shot" almost exclusively in Hollywood. The idea of a home having a moving picture camera was still almost unheard of in most parts of Texas.

But some recent news attention has gone to Caroline Frick and her mission to find any traces or copies of movies that might have been made in Texas by Melton Barker in the period from the 1930s to the 1950s.

Frick is founder and executive director of the Texas Archive of the Moving Image. She has spent years learning about Barker, an independent filmmaker who crisscrossed several states during that period making low-budget movies, an Associated Press story carried in the Tyler Paper in late December, reported.

Actors and actresses in those films were mainly children, that report said - local folks with little or no acting experience. Frick is seeking to find an estimated but unaccounted for 60 films Barker shot in Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma.

While the report said Frick is centering her search efforts on West Texas, it caught the eye of Gene Moody, of Lakeway Harbor, near Flint.

Moody was a youngster of 9 or 10 living in Tyler in 1950 or 1951.

"Our mother signed up my brother and myself and we met one Saturday at, I think Forrest Park, where we spent the day doing a 'Little Rascal' type film," Moody said. "Later on, the parents were encouraged to go to the drive-in theater to see their kids in a movie and, if they could afford it, buy a copy."

He wonders, "Does anyone else remember doing this?"

This might not have been one of Barker's films, but it would seem to fit the pattern.

Barker and his small crew would arrive in town, put an ad in the local newspaper informing parents if they shelled out $10 per child, their children would be in the movie, the AP story said. Barker made arrangements with local theaters to include the movie in its showings.

The plot of each movie was the same, but Frick said what she likes about each film is the parks, buildings and other infrastructure that offer a good portrayal of the towns where it was filmed.

Frick said she believes there is a wealth of historical homemade movies, documentaries, commercials and other bits of film accumulating dust in garages and basements.

"Texas has an amazing history and legacy of filmmaking and nobody knows it," Frick said. She is convinced Barker's 20- to 25-minute, black-and-white films depict life in rural Texas communities like no other movies of that era do.

Chances appear good historians a half century or so from now won't have to scramble to find plenty of photographic evidence of what Texas was like in year 2008.

Everett Taylor
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