July Features
His Focus Is On Film
by Dick Parker
When Bob DeFlores was a kid, he didn't have to tune in to Ozzie and Harriet. They lived across the street.
In the early 1950s he played touch football with David and Ricky, and he'd hear their mom's voice, familiar to millions of fans of the family TV sitcom, calling them in to dinner. He and David Nelson rode to Bancroft Junior High together from their North Hollywood neighborhood.
Even Don DeFore, who played the Nelsons' genial neighbor "Thorny" Thornberry, was a real-life neighbor.
DeFlores grew up to be one of the world's foremost private film collectors, preserving rare celluloid images used today in TV documentaries, theater retrospectives, websites and tributes to the likes of Bette Davis, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Doris Day, Loretta Young and Bing Crosby. And DeFlores says he was as comfortable meeting those movie icons in the flesh as he was hanging out with the Nelsons. "They're just down-to-earth people," he says.
Now "semi-retired" and a long-time Minnesota resident, he's busy with several projects. At the top of the list is a collaboration with Normandale Community College in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, with the aim of cataloging his vast collection and drawing on it for college music-history course materials and programs on jazz history for public TV. DVDs with study guides will be offered for sale to colleges across the country.
The DeFlores Film Project's first half-hour program, Big Band Treasures, was shown on Twin Cities Public Television (TPT) May 4 and repeated June 22 on Twin Cities Channel 17. Co-produced by Normandale and TPT with private funding, it is an overview of the big-band era from the 1920s to the early days of television, with short glimpses of some lesser-known bands among the heavyweights and thoughtful examinations of attitudes toward race and the role of women.
The show also includes a rare sound-on-film clip of the Ben Bernie orchestra in 1922. Who knew? The Jazz Singer (1927) is regarded as the first talkie, but sound was added to shorter films years earlier.
DeFlores is more excited by the idea of educational packages, which he said hasn't been done before in the way Normandale is tackling it, than by the TV exposure.
He said his new direction is to pass along to the next generation the body of knowledge and artistry that his collection represents. Future shows/course materials will look more closely at women musicians and at the movement of jazz from New Orleans northward -- to Minnesota, for example. Colleagues from Normandale are conducting interviews with older musicians and other people with connections to bygone days of jazz, such as Henry Busse Jr., whose father was an original member of the Paul Whiteman band and later a successful bandleader on his own.
Growing up
Bob DeFlores' family didn't remain as nuclear as the Nelsons. His parents were successful Latin musicians: Dad, from Costa Rica, was a guitarist, and Bob's Brazilian mother danced and played maracas. They worked in hotel ballrooms, on radio and in movies. But eventually they divorced and Bob's mother moved to Kansas City, Mo. Bob spent several years alternating between Kansas City and North Hollywood.
Bob and his father lived in a rented house within sight of the same Nelson house shown in the opening sequence of The Adventures of Ozzie And Harriet.
He was steeped in the movie industry as a youth. His Aunt Iris acted in the Tarzan series and Cisco Kid movies; Aunt Gladys was a secretary for Harold Lloyd, and cousin Hilda Ulloa was a columnist, film critic and a prime mover in developing the Golden Globes awards. But DeFlores didn't aspire to a career either in front of or behind the cameras.
July 2008 issue | © 2008 The Mississippi Rag
P.O. Box 19068, Minneapolis, MN 55419.