Interesting Characters In Close Quarters

Back in its heyday (the late 60s) our corner of the world (Blazerville) was never short of interesting characters stuck in close quarters. We had the weird middle aged guy across the street from Rob's (with the high-pitched chipmunk voice) that tried to cut our Wham-o© frisbee in half with a saw. We had the cranky Mr. McCloud that lived between Danny's house and mine who would rake his yard with one arm because the other arm had been torn off in a train mishap. We had Mr. Hildebrant - the first person I ever saw that would blow out the contents of his nose by plugging one nostril at a time. These were a few the oddball residents of our street that we were forced to either interact with, or do our best to avoid, on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, my movie making days didn't extend that far back. My cameras didn't start rolling until 1973, which was far too late to catch the circus show going on outside our doors. By the time I decided to make it my life's work to record the living, breathing neighborhood of my youth, we were well into the next generation of Quebec Street. Out went the old 19th century holdovers with their Ed Sullivan shows and Benny Goodman tunes - and in came the energetic new baby boomers with their Love American Style and Moody Blues.

But this film (below) has none of that. All I can offer up here is another taste of 'the usual' as we knew it back in our day. My 'like-minded' cohort Bartholomew Woods can be seen at one point standing on the roof of his house making his own visual record of Blazerville by snapping pix in all four directions. (Where are those pix today, Bart?) And the youth movement is clearly on display with Selena (pictured top) and her sister Emma and my niece Tracy. Plus we discover that I obviously used the single frame 'time lapse' feature (gimmick) a few more times than I actually remember. Because it's here again plenty.