Film collector surprised when he spots infamous KC figure in 96-year-old home movie
“These are the only copies. That’s the thing. I’m pretty sure no one would have duplicated them.”
Joe Tomelleri is describing the 16 millimeter home movies he buys online from people selling old reels they’ve got laying around in closets and attics.
Tomelleri, a Leawood resident, started collecting old films along with vintage camera gear a few years ago. He’s already amassed several shelves of reels dating back to the 1920s and 1930s.
That in itself might not be a story. But the revelation Joe had while watching some of them is.
“That looks like Tom Pendergast,” he thought. The infamous political boss , or someone very similar, was smoking a cigarette (with a holder) and surveying some horses in a rural yard.
The very next images on the film were taken at the Ready-Mixed Concrete plant off Southwest Boulevard, an operation which Pendergast also owned.
Whoa!
But that’s not all. Tomelerri has also latched onto films shot at minor league baseball games, circuses, the airport and the Kansas City stockyards—the kind of scenes most often seen in still photos from that time.
In this installment of “Reel Rare: Found Films from Old KC,” the focus turns to “Politics, Politicians and Pendergast.”
It starts with a look at downtown streets during the 1928 Republican Convention—the one that nominated Herbert Hoover for the presidency.
Jason Roe, digital history specialist for the KC Public Library, notes that the town, with its reputation for wide open ways, hosted numerous business conventions during that time.
Roe, who helped develop The Pendergast Years website, showed no hesitation when asked if the figure in the film was the man they called the Boss.
“Absolutely,” Roe said.
The Pendergast connection continues in footage from the inauguration of Governor Guy Park in 1932. Park was a Platte City judge who stepped in as a last minute Democratic candidate after the sudden death of Francis Wilson.
Roe says historians, and even people at the time, saw Park as a “rubber stamp” for the statewide ambitions of the Pendergast machine.
Jeremy Drouin, the library’s special collections manager, agrees that watching historical figures like these move across the screen is a rare experience. Like Tomelleri, he hopes that bringing the films out publicly will help answer more questions about who’s actually pictured in them.
“It’s an extraordinary collection. There’s just not a lot of footage from Kansas City in those interwar years,” Drouin says. “What you do tend to see are floods or natural disasters. You don’t see everyday life.”
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