documentary screening

I attended the screening of Bemidji Between the Wars.  I got a free ticket because my brother played in a  combo that performed in one of the documentary’s historical re-enactments.  As I sat in the old Chief Theater, now a live theater venue, I was struck by a barrage of images and stories that were already familiar to me, through my family’s old stories.  Model T Fords, Prohibition, marching bands and parades, Paul and Babe, the winter carnival, the Great Depression, farming, fishing, hunting deer out of season,  keeping a cow and pigs and a few chickens, train rides, bank failures, gangsters, speakeasies…  How many times have I heard the old timers say, "But we always had enough to eat".  Or, "We didn’t have much money but we always had a good time".   Or even, "We never locked our doors".  I know my dad was one of the "bums" who rode the boxcars out west to find work.  I think my grandfather lost his job when the lumber mill burned.  I could have told the filmmakers that the place where the ill and elderly without family ended up was the "poor farm", not the "poor house".  The town I remember from the fifties resembles the footage in the documentary, which was from 1937.  I watched the documentary with a sense of melancholy.  Out west today, a funeral was held for my dad’s youngest brother, who worked in one of the creameries, long gone, that was shown on a big screen today.