Kelsey Volkmann, The Examiner
2007-08-23 07:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

BALTIMORE -

Thurgood Marshall, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King endure on old television news reels in the basement of University of Baltimore’s Langsdale Library.

Metal film canisters and videotapes line shelf after shelf and contain old WMAR-TV footage, images showcasing history as it happened from the post-World War II era through the Reagan administration.

The collection is considered one of the most complete archives of television news on the East Coast.

But most filmmakers can’t afford to transfer the 16-millimeter film into digital video and the equipment to play some of the tapes is difficult to find, leaving the footage as it has been for decades rarely watched and left to collect dust.

The 6 million feet of unedited news reels contain hidden gems:

The first motorist travels across the Bay Bridge.

Former Mayor Thomas D’Alessandro talks about how he’d like to add a dome to Memorial Stadium to keep up with the newly completed Houston Astrodome.

A young William Donald Schaefer chats about his election to the Baltimore City Council.

The Baltimore Colts celebrate a 1971 homecoming.

National Guard troops march past stores engulfed in flames during the riots in Baltimore after King’s assassination.

“The footage of the 1968 riots is striking,” said Thomas Hollowack, the library’s associate director of special collections.

The news station spliced footage together for easier storage, making it harder to know exactly what images are included in the collection, which WMAR broadcasters Jack Bowden and Susan White-Bowden donated to the library in 1984, said Chuck Howell, curator of the Library of American Broadcasting History at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Joe O’Hagan, television producer for the Maryland State Highway Administration, wants to use some of the footage for a documentary he’s making to commemorate next year’s centennial of the administration.

He’s identified 98 reels he’d like to use, including the 1950 dedication of the Baltimore-Washington Expressway. But with the conversion to digital video costing $400 a reel, he can’t afford to use much of the footage.

“If the collection were transferred, it would open doors to help documentary filmmakers tell more stories of Maryland history,” he said.

University of Baltimore has applied for a $356,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to finance a digitization of the films for storage on computer servers.

Library directors will learn this spring whether they won the grant.

“There’s the potential for finding things we didn’t even know existed,” Howell said.

kvolkmann@baltimoreexaminer.com