Andrew Kidd of the Oakland Press chats with the then-child star of a promotional video on Pontiac made more than 50 years ago.
At the time of the 30-minute film, “The Pontiac Story of Progress and Promise " Mickey Burns was 10. The film was commissioned during the city's centennial in 1960, and also starred, Brace Beemer, the original Lone Ranger, who played the role of a professor helping a young girl played by Burns, now Mickey Kampsen, to write a school paper on the city, Kidd wrote.
Kampsen, 64, who now lives in Charlottesville, Va., said the film was a pretty big deal at the time, the paper reports. The film was eventually subtitled for distribution around the world.
The article talks about her efforts in later years to track down a copy of the film.
“Around 1985, I started to look for this film and searched the historical societies, the archives of city hall, [made] many, many calls but I couldn’t find it,” she said. “I couldn’t believe no one had a copy and certainly had no idea why my folks hadn’t kept one, but no one seemed to know what I was talking about.”
In 2004, she got hold of the film's director, Snuffy McGill. She searched the Internet and found he was in Port Huron.
The Oakland Press reports that he had an old reel-to-reel copy of the film that he converted to a a video format for her.
She converted the video into digital format and distributed to family members. The Northeast Oakland Historical Museum in Oxford also has one.
She recently posted it to YouTube.
