Part 3 of Zdro Films II, Disc 1, Scene 1: Orchard Lake, Michigan, 1941 - Repost of Comments - Corrected Post

Thanks, Tye, for putting this up!

Please note that the links for these films are posted in the "Links" section in the rightmost column of this web page.  We'll put them up in the same order they are on the DVDs.  Probably.

Here's a repost of my earlier commentary on this Orchard Lake film:

Zdro Films II starts off in a celebratory way, with a trip by Great Lakes passenger liner to Michigan, en route to Orchard Lake Seminary.  

Dim the lights - flip the switch - Where's my glass?

Three travelers:  JPZ, Eleanor, and who is the third?  That is, who is the woman with brown hair done up in a white knitted snood?

At 0:29 she is sitting on a bench on deck, with Eleanor.  She's pretty chummy with Eleanor.  Is she a Kotwas?

Correction: The lady is not Eleanor.  She is Julia Mostkowska Zdrojewska, mother of Eugene and Casimir.  The other lady is her younger sister Olivia, "Auntie Ollie."

2:00 Ooh, look at the shoulder pads on the 1941 women's suit tailoring.

Correction: Auntie Ollie was a stylish woman, all her life.

Where is Orchard Lake, Michigan?  It's not in my atlas, which is scary. When I Google it I just get some vacation resort.  (Snort.)


Correction:  St. Mary's prep is right there in Michigan, and on the map, and on Wikipedia:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Mary's_Preparatory

2:16  JPZ has handed over the camera to the young lady;  here are JPZ and Eleanor in the frame. Nice lifeboat.

Correction:  Julia.

JPZ is wearing a boater.  How appropriate!  Oh, I love this.

2:34  Oh my - Detroit.  A city that is now totally wrecked and partly turned into garden patches.

2:53  I wonder if that is Henry Ford.  I mean a statue of Henry Ford. 

3:45  That horrible monumentalist architectural style, beloved of all dictators of the 1930s, turns up here on some Catholic monument?  Did the world go completely crazy mid-century?

6:04 Okay there's Dad:  Eugene John Zdrojewski as a high-school senior, I conclude.  He graduated high school in 1941.  He did his first two years of college also at Orchard Lake.  He was drafted into the Army in 1943.  

If you play the sequence from 6:04 in slow motion, with EJZ and the two ladies walking along, you can see him gesturing with his hands and turning his head as he speaks.  His manner is so strikingly characteristic.  Where's my Kleenex?

And the stride looks familiar: it's the stride of a sailor on land . . . or wait . . . a priest navigating around while wearing a cassock.  Heavy skirts make for that slowly rolling gait.  How about that theory?  After all, he was surrounded by priests and nuns, all with the gait.  Who could avoid subconscious imitation?

6:23 Mystery Lady is wearing Spectator shoes.  Aren't they gorgeous?

7:38  EJZ in quarter-profile.  Andrew looks quite a bit like him, doesn't he?

8:05 What's with the sow and piglets all of a sudden?  The Zdrojewski family must have strong agrarian roots, that's all.

9:18 That tan building looks like a dorm, doesn't it?  There were 8 boys in his class.  Did the cooks really put saltpeter into the oatmeal to dampen the adolescent longings?  Or is that just a story people love to tell?

9:45 They must be proceeding in alphabetical order.  Great place, end of the line.  Right?

10:30 Genie brandishes his high-school diploma.  And somewhere in these movies, Johnny does the exact same thing, but in a white jacket.  And somewhere in the photo collection, Casimir brandishes his diploma with a similar great big smile.  I'll have to find those and put them up.

11:23  Wow!  A windmill! Just like Chrosno!

11:45  What are we touring now?  Ford's birthplace? 

12:11 Statues rolling out to ring the bells in the bell tower!  This is great!  It says "?????-BENNETT" above the arch.  Is this building a train station?

12:52  Spectator shoes again, in case you missed them the first time.  Great styles in the forties: feminine, yet fitted and tailored suits and coats, with those notched lapels.  Very lively and sharp-looking. Was it the influence of all the military uniforms around?

13:15  See how in the display of little Ford automobiles in the Ford Rotunda, "Alaska" of course has its own section, separate from the United States.  It looks strange to us time-travellers, but Alaska Statehood was 8 years in the future.

13:30s  As our gent with the boater gazes at the correctly-rotating and accurately-tilted model planet, we notice that the balustrade has giant pink "V8" motifs.  It can't be the vegetable juice referenced here.  So Ford invented the V8 engine?  Who knew?

Clever of JPZ to finish the sequence with a shot of summer fun in summertime waters.

School's out!

Part 2 of Zdro Films II, Disc 1, Scene 1: Orchard Lake, Michigan, 1941

Tye has run up some of the family vids onto his YouTube channel.  Go, Tye!

The vids are named the same way as on the DVDs I mailed out a while back.  Those DVDs were transferred by a professional company from 8mm film in the collections of John and Eugene Zdrojewski.  The first one up is "Zdrojewski Films II, Disc 1, Scene 1:  Orchard Lake."

This film is discussed minute-by-minute in another post here.

Orchard Lake Seminary, in Michigan, is the school where John Peter Zdrojewski, our JPZ, sent his son Eugene for high school and then the first two years of college.

He had done well in the St. Luke's Parish grammar school, and at that time there were good public and private high schools abundant in Buffalo.  So why send the boy off?  To preserve Polish culture - one of the core competencies of this school?  To give him a really good chance to decide to enter the priesthood - kind of like me taking my kids on farm calls, and with approximately the same result?  We can't know.  But it's oral tradition that JPZ felt that way.

Graduation from high school was in the spring of 1941.  JPZ, Grandma Julia, and her sister Auntie Ollie traveled by train and by lake steamer to Michigan for the graduation.  Naturally JPZ produced, directed, and filmed this event.

EJZ as a serious senior.  I have some of his term papers upstairs. 

There he is again, on the bottom right: Class President.  If you click on this, it should open up in Preview or some equivalent.  Then you can zoom in and read the names.  Anybody know about any of these other people?

Anyone have graduation photos of Casimir?  I have one of JFZ somewhere.  Let's put up graduation pictures.  If you wish to guest-blog, please contact me.

Julie

Zdro Films II, Disc 1, Scene 2: Invasion of Poland, September, 1939

Some of us have fond memories of this item of furniture.

Glorioski!  It's Gene & Clara's bar cabinet!  Let's look inside.

We want that grey metal case.

This is JPZ's film case.

The leftmost film, in the brown can, is of Orchard Lake in 1941.  We want the second one.

It's a commercially-produced film for home projection.  Specifically, it is a Castle Films newsreel.

JPZ typed labels and affixed them to the inside of the film can top.

This film is up on Tye's Youtube channel.  Thanks, Tye! It is also on the DVDs sent out some time ago.

From Scene 1, Orchard Lake, 1941, we move back in time two years.  (That's my fault; that reflects the order in which I gave the film cans to the conversion pros.)  In September 1939 EJZ was starting his junior year in high school. 

How old was Casimir at that time?

Clara Matynka was just starting fifth grade.

There is a good Wikipedia article, with links, on Castle Films.  It was a home-movie company founded in 1924.  Its first commercial offering was a film on the Hindenberg explosion.

JPZ bought the Castle  "Invasion of Poland" film and added it to his collection.  His collection, by the way, also included boxing, demolition derby, and Donald Duck.

16:22  "Danzig"??  So in 1939 an American newsreel called Gdansk "Danzig."  

16:40  Ethnic Germans trudging either east or west, to Germany.  The corridor of land within Poland that went south from Gdansk was about 90 miles wide.  Wikipedia has good maps, photos, and writeup of "Poland 1939."

18:00  Appeasement did not work, did it?

18:51  Here's von Ribbentrop getting into his plane to fly to Moscow to sign the nonaggression pact.  We can see him then leaning forward to look out his airplane window.

19:00  Stalin and von Ribbentrop on the balcony of the Kremlin.

19:24 Of the three in top hats walking along, is that Daladier in the middle?

20:33  On this simple but to-the-point map, we can see the narrow Danzig Corridor, with Pomerania to the west and East Prussia to the east.

21:18  How did the news services get that batttle footage in 1939?  For example the view down the bomb bay of the German bombers?  Did the Germans release that intentionally?  Was that their idea of news or of a public relations effort?

21:31  George VI.  The real one.

21:54  "Rappel Immédiat!"    "Immediate recall!"

22:40  Is this a film montage to suggest or represent the torpedoing of SS Athenia?  Are parts of it film released to news outfits by the Reich?  If they did that, did they think that such scenes would paralyze us with fear?  I did read that Hitler assumed for a very long time that the US would not enter into war against Germany.

24:59 They had no tanks.  They made the last cavalry charge in world history.

Andrzej Wajda's film Lotna I recommend very highly.

Zdro Films II, Disc 1, Scene 1: Orchard Lake, Michigan, 1941 - Corrected Post

Eugene Zdrojewski's high-school athletics patch.  13.5mm by barely 1mm.  Red felt cutout applied to buff felt.

The film we discuss here is up on Tye's Youtube channel, here.  Thanks, Tye!

There is more on the background to this film here.

The link to this and to all the films will be on the right sidebar of the G&C website.

All the films have the same detailed names on the Youtube channel and on the DVDs sent out some time ago.



Zdro Films II starts off in a celebratory way, with a trip by Great Lakes passenger liner to Michigan, en route to Orchard Lake Seminary.

Dim the lights - flip the switch - Where's my glass?

Three travelers:  JPZ, Eleanor, and who is the third?  That is, who is the woman with brown hair done up in a white knitted snood?

At 0:29 she is sitting on a bench on deck, with Eleanor.  She's pretty chummy with Eleanor.  Is she a Kotwas?

Correction: The lady is Julia Mostkowska Zdrojewska, mother of Eugene and Casimir.  The other lady is her younger sister, Olivia, "Auntie Ollie."

2:00 Nice shoulder pads on the 1941 women's suit tailoring.

Where is Orchard Lake, Michigan?  Ah, here.

2:16  JPZ has handed over the camera to the young lady;  here are JPZ and Eleanor in the frame. Nice lifeboat.

Correction: Julia.

JPZ is wearing a boater.  How appropriate!  Oh, I love this.

2:34  Oh my - Detroit.  A city that is now largely wrecked and partly turned into garden patches.

2:53  I wonder if that is Henry Ford.  I mean a statue of Henry Ford. 

3:45  That horrible monumentalist architectural style, beloved of all dictators of the 1930s, turns up here on some Catholic monument?  Did the world go completely crazy mid-century?

6:04 Okay there's Dad:  Eugene John Zdrojewski as a high-school senior, I conclude.  He graduated high school in 1941.  He did his first two years of college also at Orchard Lake.  He was drafted into the Army in 1943.  

If you play the sequence from 6:04 in slow motion, with EJZ and the two ladies walking along, you can see him gesturing with his hands and turning his head as he speaks.  His manner is so strikingly characteristic.  Where's my Kleenex?

And the stride looks familiar: it's the stride of a sailor on land . . . or wait . . . a priest navigating around while wearing a cassock.  Heavy skirts make for that slowly rolling gait.  How about that theory?  After all, he was surrounded by priests and nuns, all with the gait.  Who could avoid subconscious imitation?

6:23 Mystery Lady is wearing Spectator shoes.  Aren't they gorgeous?

Correction: Auntie Ollie was a stylish woman, all her life.  She also had a terrific sense of humor.

7:38  EJZ in quarter-profile.  Andrew looks quite a bit like him, doesn't he?

8:05 What's with the sow and piglets all of a sudden?  The Zdrojewski family must have strong agrarian roots, that's all.

9:18 That tan building looks like a dorm, doesn't it?  There were 8 boys in his class.  Did the cooks really put saltpeter into the oatmeal to dampen the adolescent longings?  Or is that just a story people love to tell?

9:45 They must be proceeding in alphabetical order.  Great place, end of the line.  Right?

10:30 Genie brandishes his high-school diploma.  And somewhere in these movies, Johnny does the exact same thing, but in a white jacket.  And somewhere in the photo collection, Casimir brandishes his diploma with a similar great big smile.  I'll have to find those and put them up.

11:23  Wow!  A windmill! Just like Chrosno!

11:45  What are we touring now?  Ford's birthplace? 

12:11 Statues rolling out to ring the bells in the bell tower!  This is great!  It says "?????-BENNETT" above the arch.  Is this building a train station?

12:52  Spectator shoes again, in case you missed them the first time.  Great styles in the forties: feminine, yet fitted and tailored suits and coats, with those notched lapels.  Very lively and sharp-looking. Was it the influence of all the military uniforms around?

13:15  See how in the display of little Ford automobiles in the Ford Rotunda, "Alaska" of course has its own section, separate from the United States.  It looks strange to us time-travellers, but Alaska Statehood was 8 years in the future.

13:30s  As our gent with the boater gazes at the correctly-rotating and accurately-tilted model planet, we notice that the balustrade has giant pink "V8" motifs.  It can't be the vegetable juice referenced here.  So Ford invented the V8 engine?  Who knew?

Clever of JPZ to finish the sequence with a shot of summer fun in summertime waters.

School's out!