Hoover Dam American Construction Epic 1931-1936
A 36-MINUTE RECORD OF ONE OF MANKIND'S GREATEST ACHIEVEMENTS
This week, I’d like to highlight a tape I picked up just a few weeks ago at the Amvets Thrift Store in Alcoa, Tennessee. I love archival footage, it’s been a big interest of mine since I can remember, especially media from the early years of moving picture technology. It’s interesting in so many ways to see places or people you know from a different time.
This fascination has influenced many of the hobbies I have —from digitizing media from the time periods that most interest me to documenting my life, my town, my music scene in photos and video. We are more capable than ever with more access than ever before to the tools that will help others understand what life is like during our time on earth, and preserving both what is left of the volatile past and the easily archivable present and future is really very important to me.
The tape on hand today has over 30 minutes of black and white footage from the 1930s during the construction and opening of the Hoover Dam, with a wonderful, informative narration, cheesy music, and added sound and foley to make the otherwise silent 1930s footage really come to life. The footage in the intro and outro sections show the dam not only completed, but nearly 50 years later, in the 1980s, being enjoyed by many tourists.
In 2011, I got to see the Hoover dam in person and it was quite the sight. I’d only ever seen a little footage of it from an episode of Popular Mechanics for Kids and in the first Transformers movie so I really had no idea just how massive it is. The experience was pretty special, but I wasn’t really into photography yet so I don’t have any photos or video to share. I did do a little digging around on The Wayback Machine to find a personal blog of someone’s trip and I came across an archive of Michael Molony’s day trip blog to Hoover Dam on Thursday, December 29, 2005.
There’s about a dozen photos and a full recount of his time spent at the dam, including taking the tour and driving across the top. I had a great time looking through it and I’ve shared some more of the photos in a note which you can check out here:
Let’s get right into the tape!
Hoover Dam:
American Construction Epic 1931-1936
1989 | Runtime: 36 Minutes
A 36-MINUTE RECORD OF ONE OF MANKIND'S GREATEST ACHIEVEMENTS
In the early 1930s, America was in the depths of a tragic economic depression. Yet the people of that troubled era constructed HOOVER DAM, still one of the great wonders of the world. Most of the HOOVER DAM construction scenes in this videotape were taken from a Bureau of Reclamation film produced in 1936. Today, practically every copy of this half-century-old, black and white film is in poor condition, but SUN TIME PRODUCTIONS located a print that has been virtually untouched-a rare find-and has incorporated scenes from this print with a new, updated narration and soundtrack. Sound effects, missing from the original version, have also been added, along with a musical score. The result is a new interpretation—an almost unbelievable pageant of this epic achievement-the building of HOOVER DAM.
Well, that’s it for this week! I hope you enjoyed the tape! If you’re looking for more, please check out my page on Archive.org for the full list of digitized media. If you have any questions, feel free to send me a message right here or drop a comment below. If you haven’t already, please check out the one of my previous posts below, or all of my other previous posts here. Thanks so much for checking out this week’s edition of Diptych!
See you soon!
—Forrest
