Film archives help keep Oklahoma's history alive

In the midst of one home video, Amelia Earhart suddenly popped into view, Ayers said.

“She comes up and gives a speech, but there's no audio,” he said. “Apparently she was doing a publicity tour and had landed there. … Someone from the Colcord family just happened to be there with a camera. That was an exciting find.”

Earhart, the famed aviator, was doing cross-country promotional flights in 1931 on behalf of Beech-Nut gum. At the time, she was flying a Pitcairn PCA-2, a rather strange contraption that combined an airplane fuselage and wings with a helicopter's rotors.

The Colcord footage shows fairly close-up images of Earhart walking from her aircraft wearing loose fitting clothing and standing on stage talking. It even captures her departure; the craft rolls along the grass before launching into the sky like a huge, ungainly insect.

Updating images

For the past year, Ayers and colleague Diane Wasser have been going through the video collections, converting some of the 12 million linear feet of film into high-definition footage. Each reel of 8 mm and 16 mm film also is saved as a smaller digital file and uploaded to the Historical Society's YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/user/OHSfilm).

There you can see Earhart's Oklahoma City visit and a wealth of other clips. The channel is home to about 320 films documenting Oklahoma's past.

Among them are some classic moments from “The Ida B Show,” a long-running magazine-style program on KOCO-5.

The show starred Ida B. Blackburn, who is the mother of Oklahoma Historical Society Director Bob Blackburn.

“We found in her collection a rare Beach Boys interview,” Ayers said. “It's blowing up on the Internet. It shows Brian Wilson playing at Springlake, which was a little old amusement park in Oklahoma City. … We put it up on YouTube five days ago, and it's got about 2,000 hits already.”