new album TURNAROUND

The year was 1933. My Great Uncle was 17 years old and troubled with wanderlust. He was a budding writer, always working to improve his craft and left his legacy in a series of diaries and letters that captured his short but incredible life. In Feb of that year he set out for Denver Colorado, where his mother was raised and where he had some relatives, then he moved on to Colorado Springs and eventually hitchhiked through New Mexico, Arizona and California, on a recently established Route 66 to Los Angeles. 

His amazing four month journey during the Great Depression is now recreated with this film. Using archival footage and old home movies from the era I painstakingly brought his diary to life. The film is a narration of his diary and in many cases I was able to find clips of the exact scenes he was experiencing, in the era of the 1930s. 

He meets a host of fascinating characters and brings them to life. The diary, and movie flow like a John Steinbeck novel. 

On his way back home, at the end of his trip, he makes a stop in Chicago for the opening week of the Chicago Worlds Fair of 1933/34 which left quite an impression. 

At some points he longed for his family, being such a young man, but when he returned home, only a few short weeks later, he took a train up to Algonquin Park, for a month in the park. This is the second Ruthven documentary, out now, the sequel, “One Month In Algonquin Park by Canoe - Summer 1933” 

Both diaries, with introduction and footnotes will be punlished shortly as e-books - stay tuned and enjoy the movies.