[E.B. White--home movies] Reel 1

Date1933 – 1934

Viewing NotesContent notes are presumably for both reels. // Further repair needed on this reel. // Mother in white and half-sister Nancy with horse. E.B. White stepson Roger Angell on horse. Baby Joel. Katherine and Nancy playing ping pong. Father playing. East 8th St. New York. Lake Placid Olympics. Maine including boats, Mother's sister Rosamund Sargent Newbury. East Blue Hill. Dock. E.B. White's chartered boat. Ice cream. Late Percy Moore of Christian Hill. 1933 boat. North Brooklin house and dock. Mother's father Charles Sargent, ca. 1933-1934. Boat. Astrid. Howard Pervear, the caretaker, stirring paint. Racing in harbor. Ray Wilder's boatyard in West Brooklin. Tug and schooner. Mail delivery. Turkeys. Friend Charlie Miller. E.B. White driving. Joel driving the truck. Haying. Howard [Pervear] helping with flounder. Winter scene with Blue Hill Main Street. Roger Angell's future wife Evelyn. Color scene of Nancy and Louis Stapleford playing croquet. Boat 'Shadow.' Katherine in garden. House -- 'The Beehive.' Chisholms. Joel's kids Martha and John. Joel's wife Allene. // ONSITE REFERENCE ONLY.

Anecdotal Comments & ReflectionsMartha White, 17 October 2009 Comments to picture (25 minute compilation for Home Movie Day) Katharine and Joel make ice cream, probably 1932. My grandmother was great at not looking at the camera. The boatbuilder’s first attempt at rowing. [as they raise the jib] This is not one of the family boats, this is a boat they chartered, I think out of East Blue Hill. [behind newspaper] This is a very typical picture of my grandmother. [reading sequence] This is Roger [Angell], as my mother says, “when he had hair.” The dog is I think Daisy, a dog that was run over by a taxi that jumped the curb in New York, the only dog that had its obituary in the New Yorker. Mail came twice a day. We still have some of the canvas sacks. They were mailing things back and forth to the New Yorker and were able to do it partly because the mail service was so good. Turkeys, I think this is 1935 or 1936. Before he ever came up year round. The poultry was the biggest part of what he did initially. [someone asks if one man with wood was Henry] One of them is probably Howard Pervear, you see Henry Allen later. My grandparents had over a dozen dogs over the years. Zeke or Zekiel is the big black lab. Minnie, the dachshund and the puppies. I think that’s Fred in the foreground. [haying] That’s my father Joel on the left. 1940 or 1942, he was probably 10 or 12. The dog is Raffles, he won him for 25 cents. My grandfather had terrible hay fever so when I see these films all I can think of is his hay fever. There’s film of Steve, my brother, driving a truck almost like this. [dog with cart] That’s Raffles and my father. High water pants. [laughter] This is a very uncharacteristic shot of my grandmother who probably wouldn’t have been caught dead picking up a pig. Probably somebody in the city wanted to see the farm. This is way before Charlotte’s Web. The geese and the chickens on the farm were the constants even in the 1980s. There were always chickens or geese. The pigs and sheep came and went. You can see the shoreline from the house, behind the house and barn. This is my father’s first boat launching, the Flounder. My grandfather built this from the American Boys Handy Book. This is probably 1942. He [Joel] actually pulled up lobster traps from it for a summer or two making money as a teenager. Now that’s the typical shot: My grandmother gardened in her best dresses all the time. She had a cutting garden out by the clotheslines. She didn’t like to cut flowers from the beds. [color shot of Joel with sheep] That shot looks just like my son. This is actually in Westbrook [?], I think my grandmother took this probably because he needed it probably for some publicity reason. [On tractor] I think that’s Henry Allen. Cows were usually boarded, owned by other people in the area and brought to the fields to board. [crowd intake of breath at spider] My grandmother was writing a series of essays for the New Yorker called Onward and Upward in the Garden, so she was always changing what was in the beds, much to Henry’s dismay, I’m sure. [unloading firewood] This is me and my brother in the 1960s. Steve’s showing off, I’m working hard. That house was owned by Russell Wiggins.