T
here’s fastback Mustangs, there’s tight pants, there’s Afros, there’s
ancient Dutch farmers walking along with palsy . . . it’s the human
comedy,” says Paul Petraitis. He’s describing the 45 minutes of film he and
John McNaughton shot in 1970 in their south-side neighborhood of Roseland
and have recently started digitizing. “Fifty years in production and we
just started last Thursday,” their editor, Bob Brandel, jokes. These 45
minutes will be the centerpiece of a documentary the three old friends hope
will explore Chicago’s history and culture and the way race and economics
have affected the city.



“It wasn’t just a neighborhood like all the others,” Brandel recalls. “It
was like a small, cohesive, self-sustaining town, but still Chicago. It had
everything needed, everybody knew everybody, most everybody grew up there,
and all identified with Roseland—unified in a way, even though the
assortment of different nationalities would rival Queens, New York, today.
In fact, I can’t remember street gangs of one nationality because everybody
you turned to was from somewhere else. I guess that’s America. Or was.”



They didn’t realize any of that, though, when they shot the footage of Old
Fashioned Days in 1970. McNaughton was studying TV production and still
photography at Columbia, while Petraitis was studying photography at IIT.
Their weeklong shoot was done as a final project for Charles Sharpe’s IIT
film class. Their crew also included a third cameraman, Bruce Quist. They
shot on the 16mm Bolex that Petraitis’s father had given him as a high
school graduation present, along with a variety of 35mm still cameras. They
also added a few scenes on a Super 8. Petraitis and McNaughton had no
larger purpose or narrative in mind at the time. They just knew that the
streets were teeming with life and characters of all kinds and that they
were bound to capture something of the flavor of where they grew up.
Perhaps that’s why they’ve sat on the footage all these many years. It’s
taken them most of a lifetime to begin to see the beginnings of a story
emerge from this document of their youth.