Re: 493 Movement

Even 51 years later, I am impressed with my movies Gregg is working with. I have the first two rolls on CD and I recently found some more that Greg currently has. Had I only known how well they would turn out, but the film was expensive and I was using a 1930s camera, so I continued to take mostly still pictures. What spurred me on at the time was watching hours of 16mm movies shot by the Holmes brothers at their place in the Santa Cruz mountains. Greg has brought out some of their Rio Grande stuff recently and I need to get that video. The only time we ever watched my movies was at the Holmes brothers place, always outdoors under the redwoods during the summer. Great memories and my films remained in their boxes for almost 50 years until I dug them out for Greg. Then we had the 493 here in Silverton for quite some time as part of the so called "Rail Yard Museum." And the 497 was with us for several years before being exported to Chama, so these are old friends. I feel fortunate to have spent most of my adult life, and even teenage years, in close proximity to all this Rio Grande steam--even yesterday I watched the 476 coming up the Animas Valley and it is still a great sight.

Many of the still pictures I took at the same time these movies were being taken ended up on Dell McCoy's Sundance calendars back in the 1980s and 90s. He would ask for pictures, I would send him 20 or 30 slides and the ones he didn't use are still in his return envelopes marked "rejects" and one of these days I need to scan those. He gave me all his 3M "color keys" that were proofs of the 4-color separations he made for printing the calendars and a few pictures he used in the Columbine books. Those are like full size 8x10 transparencies except they have the halftone screen required for printing. Up until near the end of his publishing business, Dell did all his own printing, and he personally ran the press, a Heidelberg KORD offset press. He tried hiring pressmen and I remember one he had in Silverton for a while, but Dell was too picky about quality and let the guy go.