I pried it open in my workshop. The second I saw what had been hidden inside that machine all those years, my hands started shaking, because it was another reel.
A full mutoscope reel, eight hundred and some cards on a spindle, wrapped in waxed paper and packed in cotton wadding like a man packs something he intends to outlive him.
And it was not a boxing match and it was not a bathing beauty and it was not any of the hundred things those machines were built to show for a penny.
It was a woman in a yard.
She’s hanging wash. She turns to whoever’s holding the camera and laughs at him — you can see her tell him to quit — and then she picks up a baby off a blanket in the grass and holds it up toward the lens, and the reel runs out, and that’s all of it. Nineteen seconds if you crank it honest.
In the bottom of that steel box was a card with the maker’s date on the back, 1931, and one line in fountain pen:
“Mildred and the baby, June. Do not put this out front. I cannot have strangers spending a penny on her.”
The arcade was Bogardus Amusements, three storefronts on a river street in a town that had a bridge and then didn’t. The owner was Ray Bogardus. He ran that arcade from 1929 until he closed it in 1968.
Mildred Bogardus died in the fall of 1931, four months after that reel was shot. The county has her at twenty-six years old.
So the man built the only moving picture that existed of his wife into the back of a machine he stood beside twelve hours a day for thirty-seven years, and never once cranked it where anybody could see, and by every account I’ve been able to find he never remarried and he never talked about her.
The baby in the grass was his daughter June. June passed in 2011. Her daughter is named Marilyn and she is sixty-six and she lives an hour from that river town in a house with a sunporch.
She had two photographs of her grandmother. Both of them the stiff kind, chin up, nobody smiling.
I brought the machine to her on a Saturday in October in the back of my truck with a moving blanket over it. Took two of us to get it up the porch steps. I put a penny in her hand because the coin slot still works and I was not about to be the one who cranked it first.
Her grandmother laughed at her. In her own living room, in 2024, a woman who died ninety-three years ago turned around and laughed at somebody and then picked up a baby that grew into Marilyn’s mother.
She cranked it eleven times before she could say anything.
The machine’s hers now. I wouldn’t take money for it, and we had a fight about that, and I won by being stubborn, which is the only way I win anything.
I’ve restored a lot of things out of dead buildings. Mostly you’re just fixing a machine. Every so often you’re carrying something a man hid because he couldn’t bear to look at it, and it turns out he wasn’t hiding it from the world. He was keeping it for somebody who hadn’t been born yet.