Mom's VHS Video Camera

No Cord Could Limit Her Destiny

We were the first family I knew of who owned a VCR. My dad was always into technology and so we got a VHS VCR in the spring of 1978. If I remember right, he said the ones prior to that would only record one hour per tape which wasn’t long enough to record an entire movie and so he waited a year until they doubled in length and could record two hours per tape. Our VCR came with a black and white video camera and the whole package cost $1,000, which in 2025 money is about $5,000.

The camera our VCR came with was not a wireless camcorder. There was a box that connected to the VCR, and a thick cable that ran from the camera to the box. The cable was probably 25’ long, give or take. We could put the camera anywhere in our living room and a few times I even stretched it to my bedroom. Moving the VCR itself, which weighed about 20lbs, was a dealbreaker.

Setting up the camera was an ordeal. It spent most of its time in a closet, but on special occasions like holidays or birthdays or when relatives from out of town would come to visit, it would come out. My dad spent a lot of time setting it up every Christmas morning to record me and my sister opening gifts and discovering what Santa had brought. My sister and I then spent a lot of time moving around the room, forcing my dad to constantly move the camera to capture us!

Christmas, 1979. It’s hard to see but I am probably opening Star Wars toys.

A few years later we upgraded everything and got a new VCR and camera. The new camera was color — all our Christmas home videos prior to 1983 are in black and white and all the ones after that are in color. The black and white camera was very primitive and sensitive to light, making filming outdoors almost impossible. The new camera had things like autofocus and would adjust to the brightness. There was just enough cord for my mom to pull the camera out into the front yard and make videos of me, my sister, and all our friends riding bikes and doing random things.

It wasn’t long before we got another VCR — a portable one. Again, we’ll refer to this as “luggable” more than portable, as it was quite bulky. The new VCR came with a plastic and vinyl carrying case and a shoulder strap. It had two batteries that could be charged and, I think, a 12v adapter for running the unit off of a car’s cigarette lighter port. If you were willing to hang a VCR over one shoulder and put a camera on top of the other one, you could go and make movies anywhere.

And my mom did.

Decades before people owned cell phones and years before portable camcorders were a thing, my mom lugged that VCR/camera combo all over the place. She was the one in the back of the auditorium recording our school plays, she recorded my karate tournaments, and even took the setup to the Grand Canyon when we went there in 1984. She probably got mistaken as a news reporter with all the gear she was toting around.

I got my love of technology from my dad, and my love of making movies and creating stories from my mom. I continued the tradition of recording every Christmas morning around my own house and every time I set up my GoPro or iPhone to make a YouTube video, I think of all the little movies my mom shot 40 years ago.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there who supported our creativity and let us be fun weirdos!