“That’s my baby!” Greenbelter Beasy Sanders exclaimed, moving in closer to the monitor showing footage of her then-6-month-old daughter splashing around in a bathtub, film she hadn’t seen in years. She laughed, recalling old memories like her baby’s first Christmas in their Berwyn Heights rambler, as onlookers called out the names of familiar old toys like the Fisher-Price corn popper push toy and a Busy Box that were seen in the film.
She was not the only one riding a wave of nostalgia Saturday at the Makerspace, the scene of Home Media Digitization Day(s). The weekend event, sponsored by the Old Greenbelt Theatre, reunited around two dozen people with distant memories, which in some cases included ancestors whom they had only seen in still photographs, and had never seen walking and talking.
“I heard my great-grandmother speaking for the first time,” said Liz Wells, a former Greenbelt resident who now lives on the Eastern Shore.
What did she say?
“She said ‘Don’t film me’ while shaking her head, so my father panned the camera away from her. Slowly.” Her father, St. Clair “Skeeter” Reeves, was a former mayor of College Park, and the film rolls she hadn’t looked at in 45 years also contain footage she thought might be of interest to that community as well as to her family.
Read more of this story in the February 22 News Review.
