This was my father’s 10-year reunion after graduating from Swarthmore in 1936 as a mechanical engineer, and he captured about a minute and a half of home-movie footage… which I digitized 75 years later:

Swarthmore College Reunion 1946 from Steven K Roberts on Vimeo.

He has a little cameo at the top of the page, walking with the 36’ers, wearing a suit and looking at his camera.

Harbor Digitizing scanned this film at 2K (well into the grain), then did basic editing to improve color, stabilize camera jitter at the cost of a little sharpness, and clean up transitions. For 75 years the film sat in a metal box… and is now available for Swarthmore alumni to share or add to collections (download is enabled from the clip’s Vimeo page).

If you have any information to add about names and places… please feel free to contact me and I will append notes to this post to help future researchers (this archive will be maintained in perpetuity by the Computer History Museum after I am gone, and of course I want the film to make it into the college archives. He also got about three minutes of footage of the 1941 reunion, longer and with lots of interesting details.

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