By Virginia Wright

Nashua, N.H., celebrated its 100th birthday in 1953 with the biggest parade in the city’s history. Hundreds of people lined the streets to watch the smartly uniformed U.S. Air Force Drum and Bugle Corps march with military precision in sharp contrast to the exuberant prancing of the Ferko String Band made up of Mummers from Philadelphia in glittering costumes and feathered headdresses. Nashua businesses and organizations tried to outdo each other with elaborate floats. Boys and girls jumped from diving boards into a rolling swimming pool. On another decorated flatbed, children on a swing set swooped out over the street and back.
    Hometown son David Almus Gregg II (1908-1973) captured it with his 16mm movie camera, and today we watch his colorful record with a mixture of amused shock (“They let kids do that?”) and bittersweet nostalgia (“What happened to our innocence?”). Once again we are reminded that archival films tell us as much about who we are as who we were.

Frame enlargement, Hugh Gregg Campaign, 1951-1952, David Almus Gregg II Collection

    Nashua’s Centennial “Chromatomic” Parade is one of four reels in the David Almus Gregg II Collection, which came to NHF by way of the Nashua Public Library. David’s brother, the late New Hampshire Governor Hugh Gregg (1917-2003), father of current Senator Judd Gregg, loaned the movies to the library after David’s death. “We are delighted that David’s films have apparently been such a hit at the library,” Gov. Gregg wrote to the library trustees later that year. “Obviously he would feel very flattered to know his amateurish efforts as a photographer have been so well received. He probably should have been a journalist anyway, as he loved to follow exciting events and record them with both movie and still cameras; yet he never had any formal training in art… We would be proud to have any of the films as widely presented or distributed as possible.”
    When Hugh Gregg died in 2003, Music Art Media Librarian Charlie Matthews reminded family members of the films’ existence and invited them to a screening of Nashua’s Centennial “Chromatomic” Parade. Delighted by what they’d seen, they readily agreed with Matthews that the films should be donated to NHF. We have provided the library and the family with DVD-R copies. (For more on Nashua Public Library and Charlie Matthews, see MIR Summer 2008, Page 7, Nashua Public Library Blog.)
    The footage includes Nashua’s Disaster Decade covering three calamities of the 1930s: the Merchant’s Exchange building fire, the infamous Crown Hill Fire, which left more than 1,000 people homeless, and the Great Flood of 1936, which found the Greggs’ sash and blind factory under eight feet of water. In the 1990s, Nashua reference librarian Jeannine Levesque made a VHS copy with voice-over narration that continues to circulate at the library. It includes Gregg’s record of the aftermath of the B&M Red Wing Montreal-Boston train wreck on Nov. 12, 1954.
    Shot in the early 1950s, Crotched Mountain Rehabilitation Center features cowboy Rex Trailer, host of the Boston weekend-morning children’s show Boomtown, singing for disabled children at the facility, which was founded by David and Hugh Gregg’s father, Harry.
    The final film in the collection, Hugh Gregg Gubernatorial Campaign, is a record of events in Washington, D.C., Dartmouth and Newmarket, N.H., and Seattle, during 1951 and 1952.