Helen Marie Lounsbury and Walter Galicki — 1950s Berne on film

Helen Marie Lounsbury and Walter Galicki, pictured here on their wedding day, Dec. 21, 2019, combined their movie collections as well as their households when they married. As Galicki was organizing the collection, he came upon a DVD of a film of typical Hilltown scenes made in 1950 by Ray Morrow. Through “computer wizardry,” he paired the images with music of the era. Galicki, who grew up in Brooklyn, played the accordion as a child — once with Arthur Godfrey and Lawrence Welk — and often on a Polish radio show. “I was known as Dizzy Fingers,” he says in this week’s podcast. Lounsbury, over her years as a teacher at the elementary school in Berne, had delighted her students with the film. She used her many Hilltown acquaintances to piece together the identities of each of the buildings — from houses to businesses to churches to post offices — and each of the people — from proprietors to teachers to ministers to farmers — pictured in the film. The information culled from heartfelt sessions where old timers shared their memories is included at the end of the film. “Visually, Berne is a place that time has forgotten,” said Lounsbury. “A lot of the houses are still standing.” While the landscape and many of the structures remain the same, the experience of watching the film is like going back in time — to an era when women wore dresses and pillbox hats, where men lined up to shoot clay pigeons, and where children took care of their farm animals and in their free time went swimming in a pond in summer and sledding down a hill in winter — not a screen in sight. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.