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Fun at the
HAROLD LLOYD BIRTHPLACE
GRAND OPENING
in Burchard, Nebraska
September 21, 2003
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This is me, David Gasten, in front of the Harold Lloyd
Birthplace in Burchard, Nebraska, on September 21, 2003, the day of its Grand
Opening. The house was completely restored earlier that year
thanks to a government grant. This Grand Opening was the first
time the restored house had ever been made open to the public. |
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| If we switch our view to the west (we are looking
directly north in this picture), you can see the entrance to the
house. The Harold Lloyd Birthplace is quite small, having only
three rooms. The largest is the one you will see when you
enter the door. |
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The front room was posted with information
on Harold Lloyd, as well as a small collection of pictures of him and of
the restoration of the house. The Harold Lloyd Foundation, the
organization in charge of the house, has high hopes for this
historic landmark. One of their plans is to show Harold's movies
to bus tours, which they will project on the wall where the old man
is bending over the table. |
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| Behind the door were two chairs, which looked like a
perfect place to interview Esther Tegtmeier, founding member of The
Harold Lloyd Foundation. Mrs. Tegtmeier (pronounced TEG-mie-er)
and her husband Frank lived in the house from 1952 to 1982, and their
vision for preserving the house is the main reason it stands today,
as there was talk of tearing it down at one time. Mrs.
Tegtmeier is wearing a Harold hat and I'm wearing Harold
glasses. I accidentally left my microcassette player home, so
I had to scribble notes as Mrs. Tegtmeier answered my
questions. I was interviewing her for an article that I was
writing for the official Harold Lloyd site to help the Foundation
raise money, which it did. The official Harold site is down
now, but you can read a longer version of my article at haroldlloyd.us. |
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After you enter the house, if you turn to
the right and walk about four steps, you will enter the sitting
room, which you see here. The Foundation was waiting on a
number of memorabilia items from the Harold Lloyd Trust in
California (operated by Suzanne Lloyd, Harold's granddaughter), and
planned to begin decorating the walls once they received them, which
is why the walls are bare in this photo. |
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| Continue walking through the sitting room, and to your
left you will see the entrance to a small third room, the final room
in the house. This room was converted into a little
"store" where you could buy Harold T-shirts, Harold
glasses, Harold envelopes, the Harold poster you see on the
right-hand side of the picture, and copies of the now out-of-print
Gill/Brownlow documentary Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius
(1989). |
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Two blocks north of the house is the old
Burchard Public School house, which has since been converted into an
events center called Best
Inn Burchard. On the lawn they had an antique car show
(two cars) and a hot dog supper, after which they screened the 1962
documentary Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy. The
atmosphere was that of a group of small-town folk getting together
to celebrate a local hero, which happened to be Harold Lloyd.
Its smallness and hominess made for a comfortably enjoyable
celebration, although given the event's small-town nature, it was a
little hard to believe that the celebration was in honor of one of
the biggest movie stars of the Roaring Twenties! |
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I've written an in-depth article about
the opening of the Harold Lloyd House and the ten-year struggle to
preserve it, which you can read at Annette d'Agostino Lloyd's haroldlloyd.us website. |
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