[env-trinity] Trinity River's Water

[Byron]

CELEBRATION AT WHISKEYTOWN LAKE:

Presidential effort: Tape of Kennedy's dedication of dam to be shown at
Whiskeytown

Redding Record-Searchlight – 8/29/06

By Marc Beauchamp, staff writer

 

Rarely seen footage of a live broadcast of President John F. Kennedy's Sept.
28, 1963, visit to dedicate Whiskeytown Dam will be shown this weekend at
Whiskeytown Lake. 

 

"It's just like watching it on TV," said Clinton Kane, an interpretive
ranger with the National Park Service. 

 

The black-and-white footage, originally aired on KRCR, was painstakingly
restored by Jeff Engell of Crown Camera in Redding. It's the highlight of a
two-hour DVD Engell has produced, using donated time and materials. 

 

Engell will show excerpts from the DVD and answer questions at 8:30 p.m.
Saturday at the Oak Bottom Amphitheater. 

 

The DVD includes a 15-minute Bureau of Reclamation color film of the visit,
footage of commemorative coins and other memorabilia marking the event, and
recent interviews with those who attended the dedication, including Redding
civic leaders and a school girl who walked from Hayfork. 

 

Engell spent 1½ years and about 1,500 hours on the project. About half the
time was spent restoring the badly deteriorated film of the KRCR broadcast. 

 

Engell, 45, has a personal connection to Kennedy's north state visit, part
of a presidential tour to promote conservation. 

 

His grandparents, Ben and Ruth Smith, who owned the former Maple Shop
furniture store on Bechelli Lane, donated an American colonial-style chair
for the president to sit on. 

 

"It was quite an expensive chair back then," Engell said Monday. "It was a
proud thing for our family to have been a part of that." 

 

Before, a three-minute sound recording and a few still photographs were the
only reminders of Kennedy's Whiskeytown visit, Kane said. 

 

The KRCR live remote broadcast shows Kennedy breaking from his Secret
Service entourage to greet and shake hands with the public, Kane said. 

 

Kennedy's visit to the Redding area came less than two months before he was
assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. 

 

Plans are to make the DVD available to local schools and sell it at the
Whiskeytown park visitor's center, he said. Proceeds will benefit the park's
interpretive programs, Engell said. 

 

 

Byron Leydecker

Friends of Trinity River, Chair

California Trout, Inc., Advisor

PO Box 2327

Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327

415 383 4810

415 383 9562 fax

bwl3 at comcast.net

bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary)

http://www.fotr.org

http://www.caltrout.org

 

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