Richard Glaze 16mm Film Digitization Project II

My name is James Bow, and I am the editor of Transit Toronto, a fan-run Internet resource chronicling the history of public transportation in the Greater Toronto Area. In November 2019, friends of Richard Glaze reached out to me about taking over and preserving the man's transit memorabilia collection. I agreed, though I didn't realize the depth of what I was getting into.

Richard Glaze was born in 1932 in Ohio and grew up loving trains, streetcars and all things transit-related. He was also an avid photographer. His work in the engineering department of General Motors enabled him to travel the world, and soon he had thousands of slides and photographs of rail and transit systems under his belt. He was a big fan of the streetcars of Toronto and his collection includes hundreds of slides of vintage Toronto transit scenes from the 1950s, 60s and 70s. I've already digitized a couple of thousand of his slides and added them to the Transit Toronto website.

Slides are one thing, but 16mm film is another, and Richard's collection included nearly two miles of 16mm film from the 1950s to the 1970s covering Toronto's history, as well as other places around Canada and the United States. With film fading as a media, it's becoming a challenge to view these 50+ year old clips. But digitizing 16mm film at the best quality isn't cheap, and that's the purpose of this fundraiser.

In the summer of 2021, rail and transit fans got together to help me raise close to $8,000 in funds to digitize the first third of Richard Glaze's film collection. The result is over an hour of material now available on Transit Toronto's YouTube Channel and the YouTube Channel of the Halton County Railway Museum. As we clear through the last of this material, two-thirds of the film collection remain, containing gems that haven't been seen in 50 years or more.

Digitizing the remaining two-thirds of the collection at 4K and at the highest quality will cost around $15,000, but the care and attention is worth it, as you can see from the videos we've produced so far. While a daunting challenge, every little bit helps. A donation of $150 covers a 100-foot film reel offering close to 4 minutes of vintage footage. Every dollar will bring more historic images back to public view.

So I hope you will help me finish the job and bring these moving pictures of history back to the public eye.