A 37-year-old video clip brings back a flood of memories

The video at the top of today's post is a 1-minute snippet of a longer segment recorded on Wednesday, November 2, 1988, my 19th birthday.

The clip was captured by my dad using our trusty old – and decidedly heavy – Curtis Mathis video camera. The quality is exactly what you would expect nearly four decades on, though I'm not sure the lighting and the videographer were exactly top notch to begin with.

(I say that with all due respect to my dad, who made up for whatever he lacked in moviemaking skills with love and enthusiasm.)

No matter, though. What's important is that it captures a moment in time that, while receding further and further into the past, still vividly recalls the optimism of young adulthood.

I was a freshman at John Carroll University, while my then-fiancée Terry (seen in the last few seconds of the video) was working at Lincoln Electric and banking the money we would use to buy our first house 3 1/2 years later.

There's much to savor here, including:

• A striking resemblance between 1988 me and the 2025 version of my son Jack. People have said we look alike, and I see it here.
  
  
• A starring role for my niece Jessica, who was 3 years old at the time and the star of nearly every video my dad shot.
  
  
• Cameos from loved ones long gone (Mom, my sister Judi) and those thankfully still with us (my brother Mark, my sister-in-law Becky, my brother-in-law Jess).
  
  
• Mark with my stuffed Bill the Cat on his head.

Mine is not the first generation to have its life chronicled through home movies, though I think the VCR era did make it easier to record and watch moments like these.

And I'm so grateful for that. A few years ago I went through our VHS tapes and digitized as many as I could. They're full of clips like these I never want to lose.

Time marches on. Technology makes it possible to remember the people and places we encounter along the way in more than just our hearts.

My dad would have loved (and maybe occasionally hated) 2023

This was our living room tech set-up in the 80s, featuring a big old Curtis Mathis VCR and a cable box resting on top of a wood cabinet RCA TV. Displayed on the screen is the 24-hour weather data feed Continental Cablevision used to broadcast. It was a hot, hot day in Wickliffe by the looks of it.

My father was a gadget guy.

He embraced technology, particularly in his later years. Thus, we were fairly early adopters of everything from VCRs to home computers.

Dad hoped to live well into the 21st century, if only to be there for The Next Big Tech Development, whatever that turned out to be. Unfortunately, he died in October 1999, just a little shy of the digital revolution that has irrevocably changed all of our lives.

He would have given almost anything to have witnessed it, I'm sure.

On the other hand, being politically somewhere just to the right of Archie Bunker, I don't know that he would have been thrilled with everything that has happened in the world socially over the last quarter century. And I don't say that judgmentally – positive or negative – but simply as an observation with which anyone who knew him would very likely agree.

As I've mentioned before, we were among the first people in our town to get cable TV in 1980. As I recall, Dad walked a couple of streets over to talk with the Continental Cablevision work crew and find out when they would make it to Harding Drive and what day was the absolute earliest he could sign up.

He bought us a VCR around that same time, and I'm not talking about one of the lightweight, sleek units that would be in vogue a decade later. I mean a big, heavy-duty Curtis Mathis job that could be used equally to watch a movie, record an episode of "M*A*S*H*," or throw at a would-be intruder as a show of deadly force.

We had a home video game system as far back as 1977, when he sprang for a black-and-white Radio Shack Pong console. We also got an Atari 2600 before almost any of my friends. Same with the Commodore 64 and my green-screen IBM XT computer.

The man loved new hardware, and I benefitted from it all as an equally tech-crazy teenage boy.

The first time I used a cell phone was when Terry was pregnant with Elissa in 1994 and I had to be reachable at a moment's notice in case she went into labor. I received the phone on a day I was covering a wrestling match a half-hour's drive away for my then-employer, The News-Herald (which as I recall lent me the phone).

I got into my car, and the first person I called was my dad.

He and I were amazed that we could carry on a conversation while one of us was driving and no CB radio was involved.

Now cell phones are everywhere, and it's sometimes difficult to tell how much of a good thing that really is.

Regardless, if my dad was still around, he would probably own both an iPhone AND an Android.

You know, just in case.

All these years later, I still miss the guy.

This is video of me jumping out of an airplane and being scared

 

I have skydived (skydove?) exactly one time.

There isn't likely to be a second time.

I wrote about the experience some years ago. If you're interested in the details, you can read that post from 2012.

The value-add here is that I'm providing video of the experience.

A few quick notes on what you'll see in that clip:

• I am jumping by myself. None of this pansy tandem skydiving stuff many of you have done. I went alone. This was 1991. BACK WHEN MEN WERE MEN. (Note that Canton Air Sports did not actually offer a tandem skydiving experience then, or else you can bet your bottom dollar I would have gone that route.)
• I didn't jump out of the plane or anything like that. I had to very gingerly crawl out, hang from the wing strut, and then wait for the instructor to tell me it was OK to let go. This is perhaps not the ideal introduction to an activity such as skydiving.
• Actually, for me, it wasn't "skydiving" so much as "falling terrified from 3500 feet in the sky."

I made it safely to the ground, where my dad tried to capture footage of me touching down just short of the gravel circle that was our landing target and then dropping and rolling as I was taught. But his clunky old Curtis Mathis camcorder was a little too unwieldly for him to get me in frame, so what resulted is just a confused sweeping of the sky, followed by a 2-second shot of me gathering up my parachute. He tried.

Anyway, in sum when it comes to skydiving: Did it, glad I did it, won't plan on doing it again.