More El Paso-related videos showing up on Texas Archive of the Moving Image

It’s called the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, an ever-growing online digitized collection including old home videos and amateur films that rivals YouTube.

A web site that will keep history buffs entertained for hours on end.

“It’s hard to overstate the importance of this archive,” said Charles Horak, artistic director of the Plaza Classic Film Festival and a board member for the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, which for the past four years has held a roundup in El Paso, taking old videos, digitizing them and putting them online. “They’ve had some of their largest film roundups here. We hope to have them back next year, because I think we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s out there in closets and basements and attics.”

A quick “El Paso” search yields such gems as this clip from a 1940’s Texas College of Mines football game at Kidd Field, donated by the UTEP library. priceless video from the 1930’s of several different Sun Carnival parades and halftime show video from the 1969 Sun Bowl, featuring Nebraska taking on Georgia.

“They’ve got a lot of moving images archived of presidents and dignitaries visiting El Paso in particular,” Horak said.

Among them, a 16 milimeter film, shot by Horak’s grandfather, a former El Paso police officer, of President Truman visiting El Paso back in 1948.

“As a police officer, he had access to a lot of historic events,” Horak said.

Perhaps none of the El Paso-related videos can top a 1963 visit by President Kennedy, less than six months before he was assassinated during that November day in Dallas five decades ago.

“Now we have our cell phones, but 100 years ago, 50 years ago, people were making home movies of very important things and that can be preserved now,” Horak said.

The non-profit Texas Archive of the Moving Image was started back 2002 by University of Texas professor Dr. Caroline Frick.