Cut! That’s A Take!

One day, way back in the 1980’s, I was sitting in my office at the little center I was working at in Eastie (located across the River from Boston, but no, not East Boston. A neighborhood within a larger city.) I had just wrapped up a planning session with my Brain Trust of residents, planning our next project for the community. Into this placid coffee-drinking interlude walked someone who literally changed the course of my life: a lady named Rika Welsh.

Rika was a powerful advocate for community media, which you may know as community access television. The company she was working for, American Cable Systems, was trying to get the contract to cable the city where I was working. One of Rika’s jobs was to get folks to be enthused about generating local community content.

On offer was free training and access to equipment that could be used for projects that would be aired on local access television. I was hooked, and soon I was seen around the neighborhood shooting video for numerous projects, small and large. In those days, the “portable” equipment was huge—a large tape recorder, a cable, and a camera. In addition, you had a tripod for stabilization and perhaps a shoulder mount for “hand-held” shots. You really needed an assistant to lug around all this stuff, and mine was my assistant, Joe. Joe tried hard not to be an ingrate for my offering to train him on all these new skills that had us lugging “portable” equipment all over the neighborhood, shooting videotape of the gardens of various groups, Saints Festivals, and other events. Today I can shoot an entire production with a camcorder the size of a toaster, but then a certain amount of brawn helped.

Our neighborhood had been largely ignored by folks on the college side of town. So a huge focus for us was the heritage of the local ethnic groups, and pretty soon I had turned projects that had earlier been slide and talk presentations into fully envisaged television.

On the college side of town, the neighborhood was known for a famous discount store, working-class residences, and factories. This was an opportunity to make the community the protagonist in its own story. I learned to set shots up, compose them, and then learned to edit the material into fairly professional presentations.

So it wasn’t someone else’s media, film, or TV that changed my life; it was the material that, in cooperation with the Eastie community, we were able to produce and present.

So, wherever you are, Rika Welsh, thank you!

photograph by Louis N Carreras, copyright