Ron Bellavacqua from Dedham, Massachusetts, has quite a story. His father was in a fighter group that went through Italy supporting the British Aid Army. The film he brought in to digitize was taken by the Army Air Corp. The 79th Fighter Group had a reunion and they dug up the old film reel and transferred the historic film footage to a VHS tape. Ron brought the VHS tape to digitize to a DVD.
Ron is thrilled that now that he has preserved this never-on-the-history-channel-before footage of his Dad’s fighter group at Mount Vesuvius, he’ll be able to share it with his grandchildren.
I was 7 years old when the Thriller album was unleashed on the world. In those days video conwtdoun shows like the CHUM FM Countdown where huge and I’d stay awake late on Friday evenings just to watch the Thriller video. It was always the number one video so that meant I had to stay up until midnight so I could see it. Sometimes I’d fall off to sleep before they played it and that always sucked. I had all the MJ merch glitter gloves, thriller sunglasses, buttons, posters, books, tapes and records. I always regretted never owning the Beat It jacket. I love that jacket to this day. I remember returning to school in September of ’83 and all the kids were wearing leather pants. Some had the Thriller jacket too. The bastards I thought out of jealousy of course.It was sad to see the memorial on tv yesterday. It seems to me like MJ has had his big comeback after all but it is sad that it has had to happen only after his death as this is usually the case. He is top of the sales charts once again as new generations are downloading his music for the first time. Let’s hope the media doesn’t get too carried away with his death though this morning I heard that MJ was nearly bald when he died (either from genetics or from a fighting a recent bout of skin cancer). Oh the things that will come out now