By Cate Lecuyer
BEVERLY — More than a century worth of local history — chronicled on video by resident Ted Josephs over the last 20 years — is now available to the public on DVD.
BevCam, the city's local cable access station, has been consistently airing Joseph's show, "Beverly's Times Past," since he started making it back in the 1980s. But for the past 21/2 years, BevCam staff has been converting the footage from the original, now obsolete, video cassettes onto DVDs.
They recently completed the project and yesterday presented copies of all 183 hourlong shows to both the Beverly Public Library and the Beverly Historical Society, where they will be available free to the public.
"If we were to lose this, we would have lost so much," said BevCam Associate Director Walt Kosmowski.
Beverly Historical Society Interim Director Darren Brown and Beverly Library Director Pat Cirone said having immediate access to the shows, instead of having to wait for them to air on BevCam, will be valuable to the community.
The shows are centered on interviews with local people talking about their past. There's a series that includes stories told by World War II veterans and shows actual footage of fighting that they took while oversees.
Another series focuses on the freight trains that came in and out of the United Shoe Machinery Corporation, now the Cummings Center.
The stories people tell go back to the late 1800s and are complemented by old photos, newspaper articles and other archives that Joseph found in the historical society.
It cost about $5,000 to convert the video to DVD, and the enterprise was paid for through grants and community donations, according to BevCam staff.
"Keeping this legacy going was very important," Kosmowski said, and many businesses and individuals felt the same way. "They were eager to help fund the project because they realized if not it would just end up as a pile of dust."
The show itself is popular in the city — over the years Kosmowski has had people tell him how much they enjoy it — and it will continue to air at least once a week on Channel 10.
In the meantime, BevCam staff plan to go through their other videotapes and see if there's anything else worth converting to DVD, said Donald Berman, president of the BevCam board of directors.
"We're going to discuss how much we can afford to archive," he said.
