Re: Cumbres & Toltec TV commercials

I can give you a little background on these (but not much).

While I was researching and writing the Winter issue of the C&TS Dispatch including the reminiscence of late (Sen.) Hugh Fowler who was instrumental in Colorado's portion of the Railroad's purchase, I was looking for one of the original "Conservation Bonds" that were issued around 1969-70 to help buy the line from the D&RG. It turned out that Bill Lock (founder of the Friends) had four boxes of Hugh Fowler's records from that period. At my request he brought them to the Friends office here in ABQ and I sat down and went through the contents of the files.

OMG, it appears that Hugh never threw ANYTHING away. There were tons of records, memos, notes, receipts, fliers (mostly of little interest, at least to me) AND the original "Conservation Bond #1" that was given to Gov. John Love of Colorado in 1970, an honorary gift, not attached to any dollar gift amount. The image of that bond is on the back page of the Winter C&TS Dispatch. [ngdiscussion.net]

But also in those boxes were several films: multiple 16mm copies of the TV commercials above, one longer 8mm home movie and an audio tape. I gathered them up and shipped them to Ian who has the capability to transfer the 8mm film to digital and he sent out the 16mm film to a lab in LA for transfer. As Ian mentioned, the TV commercials (several labeled for KMGH Ch. 7 Denver) had deteriorated to a magenta cast (with Ektachrome film, the cyan dye is unstable and deteriorates over time, leaving the magenta color intact; you may have noticed that magenta shift in some of your old color sides from the 50s and 60s) so he converted them to a tolerable black and white for viewing.

There were four different commercials (Ian has uploaded the first two of them), with an identical narration but slightly different footage on each. As Ian speculates, they all look as if they were shot around 1970, given the paint scheme on 483.

For only $7 million for those 30-seconds, we could put one of them on during the Super Bowl!

I'm looking forward to seeing the longer 8mm film. No clue what the audio tape contains but it just might be the narration for the TV commercials, or perhaps a radio spot.

All in all it was an interesting bit bit of archaeology.

Chris James, Editor
C&TS Disptch