[Archie Stewart--home movies] Reel 016

Date1929

Can DescriptionsNHF cataloguer's notes, 1/96: Reel 16: Archie Stewart can notes: 1929 trip to Maine. 3 Sept 1990, showed this reel this afternoon. It clearly shows and identifies Father's 1927 engine both on the lake and in its carrying case. Good of general interest. Opens with iris 'Member Amateur Cinema League.' Loading canoe on top of 1920s car. Mary Stewart (mother) with rifle. Young child (Mary) and Rob Golding horse around with dead rabbit. Daughter Mary plays peek-a-boo through log cabin doorway. Mary gets piggyback ride. Rob Golding fits child into huge hollow in base of tree, some cute hide-and-seek shots. Golding poses with stringy fake beard [lichen]. Hunters unloading deer kill from canoe. Building huge bonfire in snow covered woods. Archie, wife and daughter warming beside bonfire. Grandpa puts fake beard on child, both ham for camera. Skating on lake. VS of family loaded into canoe, trailing second boat with dead deer. Pulling gear on sleds, and canoes, across ice. Loading deer carcasses on every conceivable part of automobile. Mary Stewart Hafer notes: November 1929. Mother and I, age 5, accompanied Archie on a hunting trip to The Pines [camp on Sysladobsis Lake]. We are shown with Rob Golding, who accompanied us. Getting out was quite an adventure. We were frozen in. I believe Howard Kendall walked out to get help. Father has told me that he had to buy a canoe in order to be rescued. We went across Dobsis Lake in the shot showing a canoe going through a broken channel. We spent the night at Dennison's Portage where there was a year-round caretaker and his wife. Next day, we walked down the Pocumcus Narrows on thin ice. Mother has said that when it would crack under her (she was pregnant with my sister), Archie would quickly go away. She wasn't happy about this until she realized that his presence put more wight on the ice. When we got to the mouth of the narrows, Rob Golding built a big bonfire and we sat down to wait until we were rescued. Rob and Mother did a good job of amusing me with lichen whiskers and other silly stuff. Mother drew picture on big tree fungi. The rescuers didn't come, so we had to go back to Dennison's. We went down again the next day, and they finally did come. The next scene shows the men dragging the deer carcasses over ice to the beach at Grand Lake Stream. The man looking at the carcasses on a car is, I believe, the game warden who lived on the corner diagonally across from the Pine Tree Store in Grand Lake Stream. Hafer notes, 1989.