Violins in Flight
The Chapters of a Pilot's Life on Instruments
Uncle Louis & His Telescriptions
During my childhood, I was told about a relative who lived in Southern California and produced music videos for television. Sounds pretty ordinary, doesn't it? Except this was the 1950s and no one had ever heard of a music video until Louis Snader dreamed up the idea.
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I never met my Uncle Louis but I remember family members talking about him in rather inglorious ways, saying that he was too kind and decent for his own good; that he'd be easily taken advantage of in the business world; and that his newfangled music video idea would probably cause him to wind up in the poor house.
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As it turned out, his music video idea turned into American Bandstand and MTV, not to mention YouTube, but in the end, as my relatives predicted, Uncle Louis did not enjoy financial success.
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This probably sounds like nothing more than historical fluff to you and the truth is it didn't matter much to me either when I was young. What did matter was my mom telling me that Uncle Louis had met some guy named Jack Webb, who asked Uncle Louis to help him produce music for a brand new tv series called Dragnet, which became and still is my favorite television series.
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[Every Christmas Eve I still watch The Big Little Jesus. For what it's worth, and irrespective of beliefs, I highly recommend watching it, especially for those of you with hardened hearts, in which case I wouldn't wait until Christmas Eve to watch. I've placed a link to the video beneath this essay.]
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I can't say for sure that everything told to me about my uncle was 100% accurate but I am sure about this: Louis Snader was beloved by his family. Nonetheless, Uncle Louis died in obscurity.
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Or did he?
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In honor and memory of the uncle I never met, here's The History of the Snader Telescriptions about the music videos that were once known, incredibly, as Snaders.
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To be clear, I had nothing to do with this video. The only reason I'm aware of it is because my friends in the music world wanted me to know about it.
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