Hi, Jerry Gibson, Best Cousin and Fellow Member of the LCHS Noble Class of 1960,

I wanted to follow up on the message that I sent to various former Lincolnites. The reference I made to your family concerns a point about 20 minutes into the movie when it shows an Optimist Club picnic (hamburger cook-out) in somebody's backyard (Dick Blick or one of the Chaits?). The narrator seems to refer to a family at a table in the back when he says something like the "Ted Givenses, er, the Ted Gibsons." I could swear its YOUR family! At that time there is a man who holds up a young girl, and they certainly look like they could be your dad and Jill to me! I have carefully frozen screen shots from the crude video that supports my interpretation and have attached them here.

There is a theory that the voices of the past are out there in outer space, and if we had the technology, we could track them down and re-capture them--including the voice of the Great Emancipator. The early 1950s movie of Lincoln leads me to wish there could be a way to preserve the best of the past. We try through memory, but as Fred has said, memory is an imperfect tool. Thus, we are left with the ways and means of art--our best magic to preserve the wonder and mystery of life. In this crude film, have we found your family in happy moment if only for a few seconds some time in the early 1950s? I would like to think so.

Best,

Leigh