What’s a Filmstrip?

My dad was a filmstrip pioneer, with a career that started when they began and ended when they died out.

Filmstrips, since you may not remember, consisted of still pictures, along with text that could be read by the projectionist or played from a record or cassette tape. You might say it was halfway between a film and a photo album.  

My dad’s filmstrips were for churches, and later for schools. He started a filmstrip company, Church Screen Productions, and painted those words on the side of a Jeep he bought, though I can’t imagine he got pulled over many times by interested buyers. 

On afternoons and weekends, my brother Russ and I would often help our dad at his downtown office by cutting individual filmstrips from a big spool, rolling them up, tucking them into canisters, and then closing and labeling the tops. The three of us would carry boxes of filmstrips to the post office across the street to be mailed, then return to his office. There, at a lunch counter on the first floor, we would have grilled cheese sandwiches, milkshakes, and, for a nickel, little prizes in a plastic tube from a machine at the end of the counter. That building is still there today, though the lunch counter is long gone.  

(So is the downtown post office, built in 1939, now an art museum. When my mom learned it had been converted to a museum, she looked up in shock: “The new post office?”)

Church Screen Productions lasted just a short time, after which my dad was hired by the Society for Visual Education (SVE) in Chicago, then by Family Films in Hollywood, which is why I grew up in Los Angeles. There, he took over some film and record production and made his way along the edges of show business, then taught me to navigate those same margins, which for me included a teaching credential, educational publishing, audio production, and a stint creating music and stories for Walt Disney Records. 

By the time my dad retired, filmstrips were retiring too. In his final work years, he had moved on to audio and video cassettes. His career had started with filmstrips, and it ended that same way—with the cute, clunky little teaching device that wasn’t really a film and wasn’t quite a photo album.

For my dad, and later for me, it all began with filmstrips.