At left is a photo that I snapped (instead of having the good sense to actually get into) of several members of the Springfield Towed in a Hole Tent of the Sons of the Desert surrounding Laurel and Hardy co-star Virginia Karns Patterson in the Fall of 1986. Clockwise from the kneeling girl, we see Carla Degar, Ron Weber, George Willeman, Larry Smith, Virginia, and finally Jim Harwood. These guys sort of represented the new generation of tent members as literally all of them began coming to the meetings in 1986, just as I was coming out of my shell and breaking forth into the ‘world’ of Laurel and Hardy.
George Willeman began his association with the tent through his father Russell, who worked with our Grand Sheik Carl Ahlm as a fellow teacher in Springfield . George in turn brought along a co-worker from the Library of Congress and schoolmate who was also majoring in film production at Wright State University. All of the sudden around the late Spring of 1986, these two rather large, jovial guys appeared at our tent meetings and it was refreshing to have these very knowledgable film buffs in our presence.
Jim Harwood hosted the annual Summer picnic that year at his and his Mom’s condo in Springfield. We got to talking and he soon invited me over to his place for a special private showing of some of his 16mm and Super 8 films. I really appreciated the fact that he was willing to drive all the way out to Beavercreek to pick up and entertain this wily teenage upstart six years his junior whom he hardly knew. I guess his theory was that anyone with a the love of classic films that I had couldn’t be all that bad. He even took me on my first field trip to see the Library of Congress film vaults where he and George worked.
I repeated my visit on several occasions, even once traveling to the Columbus Cinevent in the Spring of 1987 along with George and staying with them at Jim’s sister’s place. Jim also gave me some rock bottom deals on a few of his Super 8 films. In the Fall of 1988, Jim called on me to appear in his college film Road Tripped in which I played an egregious, long-haired paperboy. My last memory of Jim from those days was when he phoned me to see if I was doing okay after announcing that my girlfriend Christi was pregnant in the Fall of 1989. We may have bumped into each other once or twice after that, but our association definitely ended when he moved out west to follow his dream of working in the film industry in 1991.
I communcated with Jim, who had never lost contact with some of my Dayton cronies like George and Larry, now and then in the 2000’s, trying at least three times to hook up with him when making trips to California. Unfortunately, something always got in the way of scheduling a meeting. Finally, we were able to meet up during his visit to my area – and his old stomping ground. My sixteenth reunion of 2007 came on December 26, when Jim came over and took me out to dinner at Red Lobster.
It was great to do some reminiscing about the past and to also hear what he dubbed ‘the Jim Harwood story’. Although his plans didn’t exactly take him where he had hoped to be, he did have some good stories about getting work as a script supervisor (and initially not even getting paid) on the low-budget film Hell Comes to Frogtown 2. After a couple years of unsteady work in films, he finally settled on a job with Kodak – again working with film archiving and preservation – where he has been for fourteen years.
It was great to spend the evening with Jim, as he browsed (and naturally critique some of) my film collection. He has the same dry sense of humor and perspective on films…and life in general. Hopefully, we’ll be able to meet up in one of our necks of the woods again sometime soon.
2007 will conclude with the next reunion…
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